Wow.

Wrapped in the warm cuddly blanket of ‘research’ AOL has taken it upon themselves to release the search logs of 500k users.  Gathered over a 3 month period the data amounts to 20 million search queries.  They did obfuscate the username by replacing it with a unique number but they did nothing to scrub the search strings of phone numbers, names, addresses, etc.

This has to rate in the top 10 most profoundly stupid online acts ever performed.  I do see the value in providing this data to academic researchers.  AOL could have achieved the desired goal of becoming a citable reference without releasing this data to the public.  As a result of the outcry, AOL have taken the data down.  This is a loss for legitimate researchers as they are very unlikely to release it again for fear of additional public caning.  But the data is out of the bag and this tasty data set will be circulated amongst those that would use it for less than lofty goals ad infinitum.

Nice job AOL, you could not have kicked the pooch any worse if you had planned it.

AOL Releases Search Logs for 500,000 users