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The Paradigm Shift on AOL's massive search keyword dump - great reading

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mouser:
Ok this is may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the blog "The Paradigm Shift" has some really interesting thoughts on a recent publication of massive amounts of keyword search statistics by AOL.  As i understand it, basically this is highly sought after data that can help spammers, advertisers, and specialists in improving site rankings on google (and thus publicity) to figure out what words to use on their pages to get more traffic.


http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/

Aol Releases Googles most prized Keyword List… Google is gonna get mega spammed.

I’m shocked that AOL released this data,  Google is going to be pissed, this is because AOL search is just google search rebranded.

http://research.aol.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Research.500kUserQueriesSampledOver3Months

The big affiliate marketers will make millions off this,  i’m already busy processing the data,  and after taking a quick peak at the data its an absolute gold mine for PPC and SEO.
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As you can see the top websites are SEO’d beyond belief.   This is a count of UNIQUE users going to a destination site over 3 months.   If someone went to google.com  50 times they are only counted once.

The data brings up several questions,  like is myspace REALLY growing organically?   People are hitting profiles.myspace.com,  music.myspace.com  because they infest/mass spammed  the search engines.
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http://research.aol.com released a list of 20 million + searches by 500,000 AOL users.  Contained in this list are social security numbers, credit cards and other personal information.   There are some truly scary things in this database.

There are hundreds of searches from people looking to kill themselves and even more scary are searches from users that seem to be looking to commit murder.

Check out the search history for  user 17556639,  most recent search is at the bottom of the list..  Does this look like the search history of a user wanting to do something bad?

17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 wife killer
17556639 how to kill a wife

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db90h:
Why? Why oh why? Why? Why would they do this? Why?

mouser:
techcrunch take on the issue: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/

db90h:
I found this recent story I hadn't heard of.. you gotta watch this clip from MSNBC of a guy trying to cancel his AOL account:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIVZ9b0RgmY

I'm sure the whole tape is MUCH more interesting, as they imply in the short segment. It's out there somewhere if someone wants to find it.

Josh:
http://media.putfile.com/AOL-Cancellation

Here is the actual conversation :)

or a more direct link

http://f8.putfile.com/videos/d9-16407473559.mp3


AND NOW, the coupe de gras, a copy of the AOL retention manual! Enjoy this. Its a great read

http://cache.consumerist.com/assets/resources/consumerist.comaolmanual.pdf

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