It didn’t take.Īfter watching seasons one and two of HBO’s excellent series Carnivale on DVD, I wanted to learn more about carnivals and circuses in the early 20th century, so I picked up four different books on the subject. Ohio user 4838451, interrupted a long night of searching for Fran Drescher porn to search for Senator Mike Dewine, followed by a few more porn searches and then “clear all searches”. Consider the following excerpts from user 14162375, which I dug up by searching for the phrase “kill my”.ġ4162375 how do i get my wife love me againġ4162375 i need my wife to get back to meġ4162375 i still live whith my wife can i get her bachġ4162375 catch your wife having an affairġ4162375 14162375 get rid of cheating wivesĪ good way to find salacious material in this database is to search for phrases like “clear all” or “erase history” which almost always follow searches the user would prefer to cover up.Īnonymous User 4320454, is one of a handful of users who attempted to clear their search history by typing “clear all searches”, in this case because he had been searching for “how many days or hours for cocaine to leave the system to be clean for drug urine test for employment”. It is incredibly easy to find search histories that read like dime store pulp fiction. A search of phrases like “my password” reveals all kinds of potentially damaging stuff.Ĥ) Anonymized search logs, in addition to not protecting privacy very well,are highly entertaining. The New York Times very quickly sussed out the identity of one of these users, and I am sure others will follow. Also there are are a very high number of searches in which the first 7-8 results are deemed to be insufficient, and the user continues looking.ģ) “Anonymizing” web logs by using numbers of instead of user-ids does little to protect the privacy of the users. Clearly, these users are looking for something better, but just don’t quite know how to obtain it. The number one thing that AOL users type into their search box is the name of a better search engine. Percentage of users who searched for “cream pie” and actually wanted a recipe: 0.1%Ĥ274108 aol i want to change my email passwordĢ) AOL search isn’t very good. Percentage of users who searched for “cream pie”: 0.2% Interestingly, the site most indicative that a user didn’t search for porn was a savings and loan. I used a Bayesian filtering technique to come up with a list of likely keywords and sites, and then searched on users who searched for at least one of the candidate keywords or visited one of the candidate sites. This real number for this last figure may be a bit higher, since it’s difficult to suss out all the creative ways that users search for porn. Percentage of users who did at least one search for porn, or visited a porn site: 20%. Percentage of users who searched for, or landed on AOL: 13%, Myspace: 11%, EBay: 10%, Amazon: 8.2%, Flickr: 1.2%, YouTube: 0.7%. A lot of folks are landing on Yahoo hosted sites without actually searching for Yahoo. This is interesting because the number of users who actually searched for Google is about 3 times higher than Yahoo (you can see a list of the top 500 search terms here). Percentage of users who searched for, or landed on Yahoo: 18% Percentage of users who searched for, or landed on Google: 17% Assuming that my web logs only account for half the traffic, this would still indicate that the leaked AOL data represents 3.0% of all AOL search traffic during that period. The leaked data shows 30 visits to Krazydad over that period, and I actually had about about 480 visits from AOL search engines according to my web logs. My own informal test indicates the actual fraction may be higher. According to AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein, this represents 0.33% of the search traffic conducted through AOL over that period. The data contains search records for about 658 million users collected over a three month period from March to May 2006. I’ve been trawling thru the leaked AOL data with some perl scripts and came up with a few statistics.
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