Thomas Claburn says:
Within the third of the ten files of user search queries AOL mistakenly released (user-ct-test-collection-03), there’s a poem of sorts. Between May 7 and May 31 of this year, AOL user 23187425 submitted a series of more than 8,200 queries with no evident intention of finding anything – only a handful of the entries are paired with a search results URL. Rather, the author’s series of queries forms a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.
Whether it’s fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It’s a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberation. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL’s search engine?
you come forward 2006-05-07 03:05:19
start to stay off 2006-05-07 03:06:04
i have had trouble 2006-05-07 03:06:41
time to move on 2006-05-07 03:07:16
all over with 2006-05-07 03:07:59
joe stop that 2006-05-07 03:08:36
i can move on 2006-05-07 03:09:32
give you my time in person 2006-05-07 03:10:07
never find a gain 2006-05-07 03:10:47
i want change 2006-05-07 03:11:15
know who iam 2006-05-07 03:11:55
curse have been broken 2006-05-07 03:12:30
told shawn lawn mow burn up 2006-05-07 03:13:50
burn up 2006-05-07 03:14:14
was his i deal 2006-05-07 03:15:13
i would have told him 2006-05-07 03:15:46
to kill him too 2006-05-07 03:16:18
It’s doubtful user 23187425 ever intended these queries for publication. But AOL’s decision to make the data available, despite subsequently removing the files, seems to render the issue of privacy moot. The files remain available online at sites like dontdelete.com. Having looked over the entries and found nothing really damning or invasive, I feel comfortable republishing this one user’s queries.
I made two alterations to the list of user 23187425’s queries to improve legibility: I added 10 spaces between the search term(s) and the time stamp, and I added blank lines to separate the queries by day. Let me know what you think.