Aol released private search queries of 500.000 AOL users to the public. Analysts and Journalists alike are having a busy time analysing the data for various reasons. I was able to identify three different motivations: 1. How big is the privacy breach, 2. Is it possible to identify someone from the queries and 3. analysing the queries from a marketing point of view.

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AOL surely did not think about the immense backlash they would receive from the internet community when they released anonymised logs of 500,000 AOL users at the AOL research website. The file consisted of about 20.000.000 million web queries from about 500.000 AOL users in the course of three months (march to may 2006). The AOL username was replaced by a unique ID, everything else was kept unchanged in the logs.

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