Just was you think that AOL can not get any lower it turned out they could. AOL has just released search data from it’s users.  The data contains all searches made by those 500 000 users in a 3 month period of 2006.
AOL must have missed the uproar over the DOJ’s demand for “anonymized� search data last year that caused all sorts of pain for Microsoft and Google.
-Tech Crunch
The thing that is angering everybody is that AOL released this information without the permission of the users involved. Although the username is converted to an ‘id’ people can analyze the search data and could find out the user. If somebody search their name on AOL’s search and then searched their friend’s names this could open up some safety.
User 491577 searches for “florida cna pca lakeland tampa�, “emt school training florida�, “low calorie meals�, “infant seat�, and “fisher price roller blades�. Among user 39509’s hundreds of searches are: “ford 352″, “oklahoma disciplined pastors�, “oklahoma disciplined doctors�, “home loans�, and some other personally identifying and illegal stuff I’m going to leave out of here. Among user 545605’s searches are “shore hills park mays landing nj�, “frank william sindoni md�, “ceramic ashtrays�, “transfer money to china�, and “capital gains on sale of house�.
After just looking through a few lines of the searching I can say that these are actually on the safe side. I’m leaving out the worst of it - searches for names of specific people, addresses, telephone numbers, illegal drugs, social security numbers and more. There is no question that law enforcement, employers, or friends could figure out who some of these people are.
This is incredibly strange because AOL uses a rebranded version of Google’s search.  You can just imagine the fit that Google will through when they realize that people can view some of the top keywords which can help a SEO expert and also help people with Adsense and Adwords .
You can of course download the full 439MB file from this server: AOL DATA (439 MB)