I am user #927

I was reading up on Corporate Governance the other day and about the Enron scandal. In the wikipeda entry, it stated that AOL had some corporate governance debacle recently, so I googled it.

I came across AOL's interesting data blunder, in which thousands of search strings were released for public consumption. No personal data was purposefully revealed, however, some of the search data proved to be quite telling.

Each user was identified by a unique search ID, with their search history accompanying. It was actually pretty interesting (in a voyeuristic way) to see what people searched for, and what they actually clicked on. Of note was a guy (presumably, hopefully) by the userid of #927

His appetite for websites is extremely varied, and most would probably add sick. But on reflection, actually, I figured my own searches would prove to be rather unpalatable to some. >.<

Are you able to say that you don't search for weird stuff?

For those who are interested, here is a mirror of the Full Search Data. It's a huge text file, so try opening it with Excel. Doesn't seem to work any other way for me.