So last week week AOL released 3 months worth of search data keyed by "anonymous" user id numbers. They were quickly slammed by the blog types, who knew that the search queries themselves could be used to determined identities--which is exactly what the NY Times did on Wednesday.
There's a lot to be said about privacy and data minining and who owns our identities.
But it's even more fun to search other people's freaky searches.
For instance, here's a guy from Lee County Florida who's planning to kill his aldulterous wife with either a cocaine overdose or a tranquilizer dart gun.
Here's a guy who's in to his car and little girls. Actually, until today I thought that pedophelia was more of a moral panic than a real problem, but after finding so many pervy searches I am now convinced that people are just as sick as Andrea Dworkin would have had us believe.
Here's someone who wants to buy a ranch and raise primates.
Also common are suicide questions. I consider the first four searches pure, sad poetry--especially knowing that they were written in anti-chronological order.
And then there's user 23187425, who over the course of ten days posted 2758 searches, not one of them with any meaningful chance of returning practical information. "at my door stand joe campbell"? "tell rick i say hello"? "why did i live 2 yrs ahead"?
At first I thought 23187425 was some kind of spider or spam bot, but after a few pages you start to see a thread and come to realize it--23187425 had a 10-day conversation with the AOL search engine.
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Written August 11 2006 , Tags: dan rather, search, AOL, gun
Comments
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i fear so very much for the future of the human race...
 anyone ever listen to the Theroy of everything Podcast? You can get it on alt npr in itunes.
Look up operation chastity belt. Dumb, dumb decision. I expect more companies to make stupid goofs like this. The searches (and the searchers) are definitely fascinating, though.
A lot of text miners like to use the Enron emails to test their algorithms. They were released as a text dump somewhere for just this purpose. 23187425 is my new hero
forced to be female
heh, its scary stuff. i posted about this in chat a bit ago. link
i have never evern searched AOL.
i am such a dumbass for not trusting them... lol. and also, mmm..... kinda spooky
Recent blogs: how do you Drone? long rich tones seamless
scat women send you a turd
then oriental young boys then what you see when your sedated LOlolOlol neo nazi ladys bare all
"inside of a vagina"
on the suicide search. I think AOL is getting sued over this by the way. As if they didn't have a bad enough reputation already.
learn cheers for cheerleading
3823517 the story of salad 2006-04-20 21:08:40
This is much funnier than bash.org
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