AOL Research publishes 20 million search queries
August 6th, 2006 3:45pmMore raw data for search engineers and SEOs, and fodder for online privacy debates - AOL Research has released a collection of roughly 20 million search queries which include all searches done by a randomly selected set of around 500,000 users from March through May 2006.
This should be a great data set to work with if you’re doing research on search engines, but seems problematic from a privacy perspective. The data is anonymized, so AOL user names are replaced with a numerical user ID:
The data set includes {UserID, Query, QueryTime, ClickedRank, DestinationDomainUrl}.
I suspect it may be possible to reverse engineer some of the query clusters to identify specific users or other personal data. If nothing else, I occasionally observe people accidentally typing in user names or passwords into search boxes, so there are likely to be some of those in the mix. “Anonymous” in the comments over at Greg Linden’s blog thinks there will be a lot of those. The destination URLs have apparently been clipped as well, so you won’t be able to see the exact page that resulted in a click-through.
