So, AOL released a bunch of search data. Doesn’t sound so bad right? Well, it is, because AOL included identities, so basically you can see who has been searching for what. The data spans over a 3 month period. It even gives information as to which links were clicked on the search results page. No usernames are included, but user ID’s are, which can be linked back to usernames with little trouble. From Techcrunch:
The utter stupidity of this is staggering. AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, the abilitiy to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to. The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box.
The original download has since been taken offline. However, there’s plenty of mirrors. The data in its compressed form weighs in around 439M, uncompressed it reaches just over 2 gigs.
UNEASYsilence has taken time to look through some of the data. Some of what they saw actually frightened them.
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.
People are fucked up. Really though, some good could come of this. With all this super detailed search data, certain groups of people could be targeted. For example, those searching for “boylove” or “child love” constantly could be assumed to be some sort of pedophile. I could see groups like The War Against Nambla using this information to find new sickos to target.
UPDATE: AOL is now saying this was a screw up. Initially the data was reported to be released to the public for research purposes. Jason Calacanis, an AOL employee, is suggesting that AOL “NOT KEEP LOGS of our search data.”
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Tags: ajax, blog, blogs, flash, google, google-analytics, news, services, slashdot, stats, tech, technology, urchin, WordPress, www, yahoo.
I really like Google Analytics right off the bat. After getting to see some of the reports generated, I’m basically hooked. It just has an overall nice and pleasant way of showing what’s been happening on your site. I like the map, although I’d prefer an integrated Google Maps interface, instead of the Flash. But, there’s a lot of things that could really improve Google Analytics in my eyes.
Hopefully Google has some nice changes in store for Google Analytics, formerly Urchin, now that they’ve changed the name and have gone a totally different direction as far as marketing and product branding goes.
I don’t like the fact that the data used to generate the reports isn’t live. It took about 36 hours for any data to show up in my reports. And it took even longer for Analytics to realize I had installed the code on another site I had setup. I have no doubt they’re experiencing some pretty extreme server loads. Hopefully this is one of those things that will get better as the initial hype dies down. Google Reader was unusable for at least a couple days after it’s initial announcement. Performance got better after a couple days but didn’t improve enough for me to possibly use it as my every day feed reader.
One feature I’d really appreciate in Google Analytics would be the ability to export reports to PDF. I may have to try exporting one of the report pages to PDF in IE. I’m not sure if there’s a FireFox extension to create PDF’s from webpages.
I’m sorta surprised to see Google offer a free web reporting tool before they have a free live web stats package. Especially a tool like Urchin/Google Analytics, it’s got to have serious potential to make money. Maybe I’m wrong though, maybe that’s why the previous owners sold it to Google.
It’s gonna be useful to me no matter what. I’m excited to hopefully try it out on a few sites that make use of AdWords. There’s a lot of features in Google Analytics that are specifically for conversion tracking from AdWords and I believe Overture. All that’s involved is tagging links used in your search marketing campaigns and then letting Google Analytics know about those tags. That’s only if you use a paid search service other than AdWords. Google AdWords accounts automatically share conversion data with Analytics, provided the accounts are properly linked. There’s even a URL builder to assist in building tagged links for ads.
Should be fun.
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Patrick, the dirty kuffar behind Clarity and Resolve, has a new look for the website. I think it looks a whole lot better. I like the lighter color. The amount of graphics has been reduced too, which makes for a much quiker loading page. It’ll probably save him some bandwidth too. It’s got a more minimalistic look to it than the previous design. I love it.
Also, James Joyner, over at Outside The Beltway, is getting married tonight. Best of luck to him and his new wife. I guess this will end up in the “Beltway Wedding Jam”.
Since we’re on the topic of weddings, Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable recently proposed to his girl via Ask Jeeves search. He brought Yisha (fiance) to his office and asked her to search for her name. Upon doing so the search results returned a small image and text asking the question. You can see more by searching Ask Jeeves for “rustybrick engagement“. Very nice Barry.
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Google is finally indexing the longren.org domain. I think it took right about 6 months for longren.org to start showing up in regular Google search results. Now maybe I’ll get more referrals from people searching google rather than just people searching google blogsearch.
The longren.org domain has a pagerank of 5. When I was at my old URL I had a PR of 3 I believe.
I had a lot more to do this weekend than I originally thought. After we got back from Cedar Rapids on Saturday, I came into work for about 3 hours. Then Ashley and I went to see The Nadas at Peoples Bar in Ames. Amber, Ashleys sister wanted to take her to that as a little birthday gift. Katie, one of their friends ended up getting an OWI, went to jail and doesn’t have a license anymore. I kinda felt bad, but not really.
And most of yesterday was spent playing Tiger Woods 2006. It’s wicked fun, my favorite one of em all so far. JV bought it Friday and brought it over yesterday. Now that I think about it, he may have forgotten it in my Xbox, so I may have something to look forward to when I get home this evening.
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Google Blog Search is in beta now. The search index isn’t very huge yet but I’m sure it’ll grow quite quickly. Don’t worry Google, you’re not evil, I still love you.
What’s best is this blog seems to be totally indexed already. Perhaps this is due to my using Google Sitemaps? There’s a WordPress plugin for Google Sitemaps that automatically submits a new sitemap to google whenever I make a new post or add a new page. Very cool.
Michelle Malkin took note of Google blog search this morning too, along with Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal.
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