AOL has published this week 20 millions search queries from more than 650,000 US users. The data has been anonymized, but you can still use the queries to find information about each person. AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein confessed: "This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant."

The valuable data is still available on other sites, including this searchable database and this mirror (439 MB, tgz file). You can find users like 1983280 and track all the searches between March 1st and May 31st this year. The data set includes these fields: UserID, Query, Query Time, Clicked Rank, Destination Domain.[...]

Source:→ googlesystem