Interesting Searches on the AOL Dataset

So we’ve heard about AOL’s Search Dataset being given out to the public of about 500,000 of its users. Some of the search data revealed people planning to commit murder and suicide. And while AOL apologizes for this oversight, some people are already whipping up pretty nifty tools to rumage thru the search data.

Pete shares some of the interesting finds het got:

User 9486162 queried “asphixiation by gas ovens” at least 5 times; several minutes later, user 9486162 queried “monster.com”, “lendingtree.com”, and (his/her) last query in the data set was “hold ‘em poker school” logged at 2006-05-14 09:35:43. One could argue that there is a relationship here: unemployment leads to financial problems, which is made worse by a gambling problem — and the cumulative effect of all of that leads one to want to commit suicide.

So, what say you about pre-crime?

More on this on shmula.