The recent news that AOL released a log file containing more than 20 million search requests from more than 650,000 subscribers is frightening for many obvious reasons (see here for examples of inane and sometimes downright creepy queries). I’m not sure if AOL violated any legal agreements with their user community (see the AOL.com privacy policy here), but there’s little doubt that their brand will suffer.
The most interesting analysis I’ve yet seen on the fallout is from Markus Frind, CEO of Plentyoffish.com. His recent blog posts raise a number of questions and issues, including:
- Is MySpace.com’s traffic growth organic or a result of search engine spam? (apparently MySpace is optimized for search engines far more than any other social network)
- How MySpace is killing internet dating sites (a topic Markus watches carefully as plentyoffish.com is an ad-supported dating site)
- How spammers will benefit from the released AOL data (by creating sites containing frequently used keywords and pasting AdSense ads liberally)
Check it out here.
Update (8/8/06): The NYTimes has more–they actually matched one user’s searches to her real identity (and interviewed her).
Thanks for this article, it was very useful for me.
Left by Anonymous on June 18th, 2007