For anyone who missed it, a few days ago AOL released (then un-released) search data for over 500,000 of their users. The data is theoretically anonymized by assigning a numerical ID to each user, though it has been proven that that isn’t particularly effective. Now, Boingboing has pointed to a server that has transformed the data into a user-searchable database.

The data provides an interesting, sometimes scary look into people’s lives (as Boingboing reported, user 2708 wasn’t going to take a bad breakup sitting down). I did a little data mining of my own and found some interesting results…

My comments are in parentheses.

Search term: “Furries”
User 9509539: round house furries, webster hall, alone dance lyrics, patricia fields new york, fading like a flower lyrics, your time will come lyrics (quite the music lover, I see), hildebrand peach chocolate (um, ew)

User 1142701: furries, era besmatch (baseball fan?), bronx homes for sale, zip code map of the bronx, new york city morgue (moving to NYC and looking for people to hang out with?), dell notebook coupons, bangbus (perv), beastiality (hoo boy. A perv who can’t spell), magilla gorilla, weight watchers coupons, atkins diet (no comment)

User 20799728: furries, vampirefreaks.com (why do people put URL’s into search engines? If it’s Google I could at least see using the site: delimiter, I suppose), weretiger furries, male litorian names (Ah – litorians are a D&D feline race. Smells like a gamer to me!), fantasy cat woman

User 940283: furries, myspace.com (oh dear…), googl, googlr, google (WTF?), rickyshroeder.com, fairypics, concrete garden bench, lowe’s, plants usda (a gardener, I see), terrehautehelpwaned.com (an Indianan who can’t spell?), newport chemical depot (always nice to know about the nerve gas disposal facility nearest you), victoria secret, metrosexual, erase history (uh oh), angermanagement, sex with cats (oookay – time to move on here!0

User 8006966: furries, democratandchronicle entertainemnt (from Rochester, NY, I see), nightlife in rochester, vcl.furries.com, yahoo.com (sigh), classical composers, dracopuma sex (um, what?), anarchy cookbook (tsk tsk)

OK, no hits for “furfest” so let’s try “anthrocon”:
User 1587280: anthrocon, cotton bodysuit, cellophane bags, unitards, fundraising lollipops, bette midler (oh, honey!), ice age, scrat (an animation fan!), panda dog, cyrillic keyboards, the hun (naughty boy!), pizza dough

Wow. Not a lot of conclusions to be drawn there.

User 4056724: anthrocon, final fantasy xi for ps2 (a video gamer), final fantasy xi registration codes (a naughty gamer!), gay porn (well, this is heading south fast…), irish caps, irish hats, huskies tennessee, airline ticket prices, dungeons and dragons online

User 2481740: tennessee department of health (a TN resident?), play bridge on aol, gold ball earrings, aloe vera, smallville schedule, ebay (uhhh, yeah), glass dinner table, anthrosyn, anthocyanide, anthrocon (looks like word suggestion gone amok!), gainesville florida real estate, jewish publication society, wireless wall swicth

Wow. Someone who didn’t use a search engine to find porn. How novel! 🙂

This is an amusing toy that can also be a real time-waster. So I ask you, o readers: what is the most interesting/amusing/scary combination of search terms you can find for a single user?