Some of the facts emerging about the AOL search query data they released is disturbing, and could have immense repercussions for all search engines. Andrew Weinstein of plentyoffish.com uncovered that one AOL searcher who searched for terms such as “how to kill your wife”, “wife killer”, and “how to kill a wife” among other disturbing searches.

Will the Department of Justice submit a subpoena to find out who this potential wife killer is? This data could be just the tool the DOJ needs to pressure all search engines into giving them more access to their data. Many will find it hard to argue against revealing personal information, if it means preventing murders and other heinous crimes.

I’ll be watching this one closely.

Interesting ones:

Andrew Weinstein’s piece

Elliot Back’s piece

John Battelle on AOL’s reaction

This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.