AOL Releases User Search Queries

AOL has released the search queries of over 650K of its users over a three month period. The file contains over 20 million searches. Though the users’ identities are anonymised, there could well be patterns of searching that can be determined.

It is somewhat ironic that the Irish Times had an OpEd waffling on about data privacy and state surveillance. The reality is that these e-jits in the Irish media missed the boat. The big threat to privacy is the data that commercial entities such as the search engines compile about users.

AOL Research has pulled the data but Greg Sadetsky has posted a set of mirror sites.

Tag: - - -

Written by John McCormac on August 7th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Search Engines.

Related articles

No comments

There are still no comments on this article.

Leave your comment...

If you want to leave your comment on this article, simply fill out the next form:




You can use these XHTML tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong> .