You Are What You Search

Dave Kellogg

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Just a quick post to this very interesting article on slate.com by Paul Boutin that I found here on slashdot.   Using the tools at splunkd.com and the search history records on 650K members that were released (and subsequently retracted) by AOL, Boutin makes a taxonomy of seven different types of Internet search users:

  • The pornhound
  • The manhunter
  • The shopper
  • The obsessive
  • The omnivore
  • The newbie
  • The basket case

The depth of the released data is a little scary.  You can see searches in chronological order and the exact search terms used.

For a concrete lesson on Internet privacy, click here to see the search history for AOL user 672638.  From the article:


When John Battelle called Internet search logs humanity's "database of intentions" he wasn't far off the mark, indeed.

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