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[glen]

Hi everyone,

You may have heard that AOL released a lot of data from their search database over a 3 month period. The data is available for download from various sites. It comes as a large zip file of over 400mb. And it will decompress to a series of text files that are well over a gigabyte (perhaps 2 gb in total).

A few websites are popping up where you can search through this AOL database without having to worry about downloading it.

Here are a few examples:

http://aoldb.unwieldy.net/
http://www.dontdelete.com/
http://websearchdata.com/

AOL were criticised for releasing this data because it could be used to identify individual people. So the data was taken off the web by AOL but others got copies of the database and started setting up AOL datbase mirror sites.

I have had a bit of a play around with it and it offers up some useful information about how people go about searching on search engines and it could be useful in terms of improving the search engine optimisation for your sites. But it must be remembered that this database only represents a small cross-section of all the web search engine queries that are actually performed.