Google apologizes after swastika tops searches in U.S

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People who checked for Google hot trends on Thursday morning were surprised to see a ' 卐 ' symbol coming at the top of the searches. And more mysteriously, the symbol was removed from the 'hot search list' after a couple of hours.

Although swastika remained a symbol of prosperity for Hindus and Buddhists across the world, the symbol provokes strong feelings of fear and anger for many in the west after Nazis took it as their symbol. So Google had to apologize for the incident. It said in a statement.

We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or offensive material in Hot Trends. In rare cases, when such material is missed, we manually remove these results from our Hot Trends list. We apologize to any users who were offended by this situation.

But the question that still remains unanswered is how such a symbol which is not in a standard English key board reached the top of searches in U.S. Hot trends shows the most searched keyword at a particular moment. For example ,iPhone was among the hot trends on Friday following it's launch. But without any major news events swastika came to the top.

switched.com Google hot trends image:41604:0::0

A number of theories are circulated in the web about this. One theory suggests that swastika is a good luck symbol for the Chinese. With Olympics around the corner, the number of searches had increased substantially. But, how it affects the searches in U.S.

Another theory which is more credible goes like this. An html code for swastika was put on a popular Internet message board and thousands of users googled it simultaneously making it to the top.

Whatever the case may be, the incident and the quick reaction from the Google shows how sensitive the issue is.