AOL Gives Unprecedented Keyword Search Information

It's a move that will interest marketers and infuriated privacy advocates. Google Blogoscoped reports today that AOL has released some 20 million search queries conducted by users over the past three months. The issue is that the searches are all tied together by the individual searcher than conducted them. AOL did change the data from listing the username to listing a generic user ID number, but the reality is that someone with a bit of time and energy could still identify specific searchers based on an analysis of the data.

Philip points out the problem with associating user IDs...

What’s really interesting is that queries were connected to a user ID... and there goes your privacy. Based on a sequence of searches it is often trivial to connect a person to a user ID. For example, user 500 may search for "link:mysite.com", and then user 500 may search for the name "John Doe." Now you can verify that mysite.com’s webmaster is John Doe from San Francisco, and you have a good indicator that user 500 is indeed John Doe. Finally, you look at other queries from this user – like, "jobs San Francisco" – and you have strong indicators that John Doe is looking for a job behind his current boss’s back.

Perhaps realizing the astounding idiocy involved in the idea of putting this data out there, AOL pulled things down rather quickly. The problem with that is that Google had already cached the data and the entire 439MB file quickly became available for download from a variety of other sites. In other words, the cat's out of the bag and there's no way AOL is coaxing it back in.

The full post over at Google Blogoscoped is well worth reading...and it will be interesting to see what the fallout is from this move. Just another example of why you need to think before you act...especially on the web.