Manipulation of the Google Trends query rankings seems easy as pie. On the 13th of July Google Trends top ten search terms included “ǝlƃooƃ noʎ ʞɔnɟ”. This is shortly after the swastika making an appearance.

Google states that a single post on a large forum community (4Chan) was the cause of the “卐” appearance:

“The Hot Trends list is automatically generated by machines and algorithms that detect hot or breaking queries. In this case, it appears that the html code for this query was posted on a popular internet bulletin board, which led to quite a few people searching to find out more about this symbol. The Hot Trends list reflected that surge due to people searching with this query.”

The swastika entry on the most-searched-for list appears to be innocent enough, but “ǝlƃooƃ noʎ ʞɔnɟ” is clearly malicious. Curse words are obviously not recognised in there upside-down Unicode variants, but I bet Google engineers are hard at work to come up with a fix.