Beyond The Privacy Outcry, AOL Search Data Actually Is Interesting Info
from the oh,-right,-the-research... dept
Beck writes "There has been much hoopla over the privacy concerns regarding AOL's release of search data. Lost in the excitement is the fact that AOL had good intentions. They wanted to give researchers a window into how people use online search. If you step back for a moment and take a look, the findings are interesting. Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal published the results of his research. He did not approach the story from the privacy angle, but rather from the view of a researcher who wants to know how people use the Internet. He found, for example, that the most common search term is the word "free". Also interesting is that 47% of searches resulted in no click by the user. 28% of searches were refinements of previous searches, and 42% of the time the user clicks on the first item in the search results. The article includes additional data, and a look at the quality of the search results."
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Yuck
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Good intentions?
I want to be able to use the Internet ANONYMOUSLY, without having to wonder if any personally identifying information is being used for purposes that I don't explicitly agree to. Figure THAT into your data!
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great tool for looking at the data..
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Re: great tool for looking at the data..
Most people do not know how to use an address bar.. they think you use the search box to get where you want to go and the address bar shows you where you are.
I have a dozen websites and the majority of my traffic comes from people searching for the domain name.
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Re: Re: great tool for looking at the data..
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Ya, well...
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Re: Ya, well...
jeez. this article isn't condoning what AOL did.
and also if someone drops millions of stolen cash over the city, i know a hell of a lot of you would have a go at trying to take some.
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Re: Ya, well...
If a wrong has been done, but you can learn from the results, is it ok to make use of the data?
Nuremburg (I think it was Nuremburg) said no, but I personally think that looking at the data is interesting and should be done. And obviously most of the people on this board agree, even though they're pissed off about it -- because they've looked at the data.
It really is too bad AOL botched this so bad, because properly sanitized search data would be an interesting thing to release, every once in a while.
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Funny.
"don't buy pepsi in the new can. pepsi has a new patriotic cancoming out with pictures of the empire state building and thepledge of allegiance on them.however pepsi left out two little words on the pledge under god. pepsi said they didn't want to of"
I can't see why any person would search for that. It doesn't make sense.
Then there's just the funny questions:
"how do you now if you lost your virginity"
Some people are just so technologically inept.
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Re: Funny.
I make similar seaches all of the time. They were obviously searching for the original source of a post or email they saw. This is the same method a lot of teachers use when they suspect a student of plagiarism.
The virginity question was very odd, and probably submitted by a curious adolescent. Though the question itself is humorous, this type of search query isn't as useless or "noob-ish" as it might appear. Often times, a search with a query such as "how do you make grilled-cheese sandwiches" will return results from a forum of someone else asking the exact same question, along with the answer.
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Re: Re: Funny.
Still rather amusing to look at though :)
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Re: Funny.
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Re: Funny.
Don't lose sight of the fact that this is a search history of AOL users ;-)
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will the research improve user interfaces to searc
Having worked for a company whose bread and butter was based on natural langauge search, it's remarkable how the queries did not resemble natural language.
Also, significant numbers of searches were:
a) repeats (you would think that with a wide user-base,
that there would be low incidence of repeats... we had over 20%
b) urls or domain names
let DNS find them for you
c) whole cut-n-paste paragraphs
these were so nasty we had to limit the length of queries to keep them from killing the search engine(s).
but the area of most impact would have been to create interfaces that help the user refine their query faster...
ie: dont look so hard when they say:
"I want to do a book report on a manatee"
but assist them enough so that their final query is NOT simply:
"manatee"
-E
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Wanna see what people are searching for??
It shows you what people are searching for.
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GREAT ARTICLE MIKE!!!!!!!
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Re:
Apparently you're not familiar with how things work around here. Beck is someone who submitted that story and wrote things up. Sometimes we write up our own stories, sometimes we post submissions. We didn't rip it off, he submitted it to us to post.
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