The Googlization of Everything

NYTimes.com:

Google Trends Falls Victim to Disturbing Stunt
By Miguel Helft

Google Trends, a service that shows the relative popularity of search terms, fell victim to what appeared to be an ugly stunt on Tuesday: a sketch of an airplane flying into two towers appeared as its second most popular item under Hot Trends, its list of the fastest-rising searches at any given moment. TechCrunch and Search Engine Land both grabbed screen shots of the Google Trends page before the offending query receded in popularity later in the day.

Google said little about the incident. "Hot Trends is automatically generated by algorithms and machines that are there to detect hot or breaking queries," said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman. "We saw lots of queries from a number of different places in a short period of time" for the offending sketch, Mr. Sticker said. He declined whether the queries appeared to be the work of individuals or bots.

This is the third time that Google Trends has had to deal with such stunts in recent months. In July, a swastika appeared on Hot Trends. A week later, the list was attacked again.

Search experts said the repeated incidents are something of an embarrassment for the world's No. 1 search engine. "It's not a good thing for Google," said Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land. After last summer's incidents, Google should have done more to detect this type of material, he said. "They should have been able to see that the query was not made up of words," he added.