AOL Search Brouhaha

A minor controversy: AOL draws fire after releasing search data.

AOL on Monday said it released a small portion of keyword search information for about 658,000 anonymous AOL users in a move that ignited a firestorm of criticism on the Internet amid calls for tighter protection of the privacy of users' Web searches.

The Internet division of media conglomerate Time Warner Inc. released search information on about 20 million searches done from its AOL software over a three-month period.

The data was released about 10 days ago on its own publicly accessible research Web site, but it escaped notice until this weekend.

The link to the actual file, containing searches done by users whose personal ID are replaced with random numbers, is no longer available.

The file without the random ID numbers is still available here, but the site is slammed right now.

However, I was able to download the data earlier, and I've put it all into an Excel file for your convenience: aolsearches.zip.

It's a 372K zip file that expands to a 1.3Mb workbook. The original search data was grouped into 20 categories. Each category is on a separate worksheet, and I set up formulas so you can enter a word, and find out how many times it appears in each category.