You may remember a few weeks ago AOL released search data on their users from this past May and then realized that even though their account information wasn’t included, the things they search for (like their own name) could still indicate their identity and it was a huge breech of confidentiality with personal user information for AOL. They originally thought this would be cutting edge to release to get in with people doing marketing research or something, I’m not sure really. Some people did download the file before it was taken down and then they created AOL Stalker. 

There are 2 interesting things there. One is that you can see how many people searched for a particular term within this data and then click to see the profile for more data on what they searched on to get it in context. This gives you an indication of what’s popular and what’s not and maybe an inference of why they are searching. Really interesting data. Second, there are some profiles listed on the front page that have particularly disturbing search terms. These people are clearly odd and they think that doing these things will be kept anonamous because they’re on the internet? Nothing is anonamous on the internet anymore.