Paul Boutin in Slate:
AOL researchers recently published the search logs of about 650,000 members—a total of 36,389,629 individual searches…
The search records don’t include users’ names, but each search is tagged with a number that’s tied to a specific AOL account. The New York Times quickly sussed out that AOL Searcher No. 4417749 was 62-year-old Thelma Arnold. Indeed, Arnold has a “dog who urinate on everything,” just as she’d typed into the search box. Valleywag has become one of many clearinghouses for funny, bizarre, and painful user profiles. The searches of AOL user No. 672368, for example, morphed over several weeks from “you’re pregnant he doesn’t want the baby” to “foods to eat when pregnant” to “abortion clinics charlotte nc” to “can christians be forgiven for abortion.”
More here.