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Web Group Games Google Trends in Tasteless Stunt



Those who use Google Trends were on the receiving end of a pretty ugly tasteless Web stunt on Tuesday: the second most popular item in the "Hot Trends" category was an image of an airplane flying into the twin towers.

"Hot Trends" is meant to track the fastest rising searches at any given moment; the prevailing theory, among search experts, is that the stunt was accomplished using "bots" to garner a huge number of hits, catapulting it onto the list. However, it did start with a user on eBaum's World, who suggested to his fellow forum dwellers the stunt to launch it onto Google Trends.

Despite this being the third time that Google Trends has been snaked in recent months (in July, a swastika appeared on Hot Trends), the company had little to say 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." [From: New York Times via Buzzfeed]

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