Grr!!!

I've been doing a quick web search about Chinese symbols to get a few ideas to pass to a friend (jet-lagged brain doesn't work that well yet on its own), and I discovered that my search parameters 'Chinese symbol warrior' do not yeld actual symbols as result ( like, you know 'tiger traditionally represents strenght', 'the carp was the symbol for a student' and so on).

What I get are pages and pages of Chinese characters meaning warrior.

This drives me crazy, those aren't symbols those aren't even ideograms (ideograms are a specific class of Chinese characters, just like pictograms, for instance), those are characters or if you want to get technical, logograms, a writing system, possibly the oldest  writing system still in use.