If you used Google during this year’s summer Olympics, you probably noticed the standard logo was replaced by stylized versions depicting Olympic sports.

It’s not the first time the popular search engine has used variant logos. On Feb. 4, 2004, Google used a fractal-looking logo and linked the image to an image search for “julia” and “fractal.”

The two images on the top row of the search results were hosted on a Web site located at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. The resulting influx of visitors to the site crashed the University’s server, making it unavailable.

After the site went back up, the owners posted an explanation page, which was noted at SearchEngineLowdown.com. From there, the story was picked up by Slashdot.org, which crashed its server again, due to the high volume of visitors following the link.

But this is not unusual for sites that get noticed by Slashdot.

Created in September 1997 by Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda, Slashdot acted primarily as a clearinghouse for information about Linux, the free operating system jointly created by hundreds of volunteer programmers around the world.

When Web sites, particularly major media, post articles online that mention Linux, links get posted on Slashdot and its readers descend on the site like a tidal wave.

As far back as 1999, the site could drive 4,000 readers to a popular link almost instantaneously. Nowadays, sites linked from Slashdot can receive tens of thousands to more than 100,000 hits in a sudden, temporary surge in traffic.

The experience has been coined the Slashdot effect, and is now used to describe any slowdown or disappearance of a Web site due to intense, immediate interest.

It is obviously much more noticeable on smaller sites, which can become completely swamped and shut down, sometimes for days due to crashed machines. But it can still happen even at large Web sites that have plenty of high-powered servers. The Forbes.com site fell victim to the Slashdot effect after a story was posted about Linus Torvalds (the creator of the Linux) being on the cover of the magazine.

The site was initially named as a joke, mocking the unpronounceable nature of URLs. If you dread having to spell out your company’s Web site URL, try telling people to visit Slashdot.org.

It was sold in 2000 and has since branched out to many topics other than Linux, serving up 80 million pages per month on technology, politics, science, games and more. As the site’s tagline says, it’s “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.”

Hoping to keep the content available for the Slashdot hordes while not crashing the destination sites, a different company is hoping to alleviate the Slashdot effect by mirroring any Web site linked on the Slashdot home page. This is similar to Google’s feature to view the “Cached” version of a Web page that is no longer available.

Although it seems like Mirrordot’s plan would help everyone out, it’s not ideal for those sites built to handle the Slashdot effect and who are looking forward to all the visitors who’ll drive up not only their traffic, but also their ad revenue.

It’s a double-edged sword for those who run Web sites, because most want to corral as many visitors as possible, but those higher numbers often translate into increased site hosting and bandwidth fees.

Should site owners be responsible for protecting themselves from massive influxes of traffic, or should those with the capability to funnel massive traffic (Slashdot, Google, etc.) ask permission before doing so?

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Eddie Hargreaves can be reached at meged@earthlink.net.