Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

If you don’t know about AOL Gate, you’ve been gone a long time. Well, the good news is that a number of searchable AOL Data databases have been released, each with its own set of unique features. This post attempts to categorize them all!

Databases:

AOL Psych is a collaborative project to tag the AOL user data. Sometimes slow, it’s the most elaborate AOL search device I’ve seen so far–and by far the prettiest:

AOL Search Logs is a basic, but full featured index to AOL data, with basic features like comments. It doesn’t allow easy browsing or searching, but it has the right basic features to make it (barely) usable.

Splunk’d mirrors exist of the AOL data–however powerful they may be, the interface has a steep learning curve for a non-splunk user. However, Splunk may be the most powerful, as it allows wildcarding and other advanced search features:

Other less useful tools:

• Don’t Delete search interface
• AOL Search Database

SEO Tools:

The AOL Site Incoming Keyword Tool takes a URL and tells you how people got there–quite useful for research purposes:

Techcrunch notes that AOL has released a file containing 20,000,000 queries from “anonymized” users. However, this is a problem because anything those users typed into AOL search–social security numbers, names, drug deals, etc can be cross-correlated to expose their identities. Imagine a politician ego-searching then browsing asian pornography? The scandal would just be beginning.

AOL smartly took down the download link, but once released on the web, it will always be on the web. To that end, we’re hosting the data here on our bandwidth-limited downloads platform: AOL-data.tgz. If you get in, you should get a decently fast speed.

According to Adam D’Angelo, the reason AOL published the data was for recognition in the search-engine research arena:

This was not a leak – it was intentional. In their desperation to gain recognition from the research community, AOL decided they would compromise their integrity to provide a data set that might become often-cited in research papers: “Please reference the following publication when using this collection: G. Pass, A. Chowdhury, C. Torgeson, ‘A Picture of Search’ The First International Conference on Scalable Information Systems, Hong Kong, June, 2006.” is the message before the download.

Here’s a breakdown of the core facts:

• 20,000,000 queries from 650,000 users in 2GB uncompressed tab-delimited files
• Uncensored queries for three months of AOL search service, spring 2006
• Essentially public domain
• Contains dangerous private information

Update

The data is rife with all kinds of personally identifiable data. For example, a quick grep for credit-card patterns produces the following:

grep -i -e “[0-9]\{4\}-[0-9]\{4\}-[0-9]\{4\}-[0-9]\{4\}” *.txt

• 9006-0512-xxxx-xxx
• 1550-0905-xxxx-xxxx

Looking for Social Security Numbers (SSN) turns up this HUGE amount of data:

grep -i -e “\b[0-9]\{3\}-[0-9]\{2\}-[0-9]\{4\}\b” *.txt

• kristy nicole vega hammond la. social secruity number 437-67-xxxx birth date 03 08 xx drivers license number la. 00765xxxx address 41178 rene dr. hammond la.
• pamela button 079-60-xxxx
• thomas j finney socsec 370-40-xxxx
• 419-94-xxxx thomas black
• 458-87-xxxx seguro social
• social security number 545-29-xxxx
• ssn 436-47-xxxx

I’ve censored the personal information, but there are about 200 entries of social security numbers in the test data. Searching for things that look email addresses ([a-zA-Z0-9_\-]*@[a-zA-Z0-9_\-]*\.) turns up another 60 or so.

Update 2:

If you want to get this data into a more usable form, say MySQL, try this (note that we’re not going to bother storing duplicate queries, but you might want to):

mysql> CREATE TABLE aoldata (anonid int unsigned not null, query varchar(255), querytime datetime, itemrank int unsigned, clickurl varchar(255), PRIMARY KEY(anonid, query))

Then you just need to import it, as appropriate:

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ‘user-ct-test-collection-01.txt’
INTO TABLE aoldata
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ‘\t’
LINES TERMINATED BY ‘\n’
(anonid, query, querytime, itemrank, clickurl);

Other Blogs

Paul notes that the AOL data is really Google data, since AOL search is rebranded Google. Zoli has the post that started it all.