Weird Google Trend
July 10th, 2008
This morning, the Drudge Report noted that the swastika was the number-one item over on Google Trends . When I checked it out it was number three.
Click on through to the results pages and you see a lot of Chinese symbols. Among those results is this page from the Cantonese Learning and Discussion Forums that is a pretty interesting discussion of the swastika and a slight variation as they relate to Buddhism and Chinese culture.
What’s weird about this Google Trend, though, is that it’s for the symbol itself, not the word "swastika." I don’t know about your computer, but I don’t think my keyboard has that symbol anywhere.
JULY 10 UPDATE: Here’s a story from today’s L.A. Times about all this.
July 10th, 2008 at 9:25 am
The swastika is supported by Unicode, so it’s possible to search for it. I don’t know how you’d type it, but I’d imagine there is some control-code that makes it happen.
Interestingly enough, ICANN announced this that international domain names will soon support Unicode characters.
So, not only can you search on it, but next year you can have it in your domain name.
People are already registering non-roman-character domain names useing “Punycode”. Interestingly enough, http://☭.com is one domain registered this way.