The AOL data: What does it all mean?

At 7pm on the 7th August 2006, AOL released over 500k users individual searches data, each keyword/phrase was linked to a AOL user ID, which can be tracked back to the persons actual AOL username and email address. The data includes all searches from those users for a three month period this year, as well as whether they clicked on a result, what that result was and where it appeared on the result page. It’s a 439 MB compressed download, expanded to just over 2 gigs.

There are some truly scary things in this database.

There are hundreds of searches from people looking to kill themselves and even more scary are searches from users that seem to be looking to commit murder.

You can still download the full database and see the psyche of a AOL user. No wonder the folks are at TimeWarner are giving the software away, think of all the data mining they can do then.