Google Trends Features ASCII Art Of 9/11

By Barry Schwartz

Published: January 6, 2009 at 12:51 pm

A reader tipped us off to how ASCII art of an airplane is showing up in the number two position at Google Trends. When we first looked ourselves, we thought the image was that of an airplane approaching a landing strip. But a reader suggests it represents a far more disturbing scene, that of an airplane crashing into New York’s former World Trade Center towers on 9/11.

The ASCII image is this ✈ ▌▌. Below, how it appeared on Google Trends:

The “Hotness” level is “Volcanic,” which is hottest level Google Hot Trends can see. The related searches include trends, google trends, bematech, frigorific, google analytic and the geographic source seems to be from Sacramento, CA – at least according to Google’s details. There is currently related no news, blogs or web results for this “search term,” if you will.

This is not the first time we have seen issues with disturbing ASCII art hitting Google Trends. We spotted a swastika in Google trends back in July of this year. Google quickly removed the result and sent us a statement that said it was purely algorithmic and a spike in searches based on it being posted in a forum, caused it to show up in Google Hot Trends.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.