[funsec] AOL: 'We Did Not Comply With All of the DOJ's Search Data Request

[Sean Donelan]

On Sat, 21 Jan 2006, Fergie wrote:
> Had it not been for Google refusing the DoJ, we'd have never known
> that AOL "just" turned over a little bit.

Of course, its known they release some data for press releases. Although
the largest search engines like AOL and Google tend to omit controversial
topics from the press announcements.  So we get a warped perception of how
people are actually using search engines.

http://hot.aol.com/2005/index.html
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

Academic researchers have used web query data from several search
engines for over a decade. Librarians collect and study this type of data
all the time. Librarians also have a long history of strongly protecting
the raw data.  On the oher hand, Google research tends to focus more on
the technology than the human, as you can see from the papers on Google's
corporate site. Google is noticably under-represented in research on
information science (previously known as library science).

Unfortunately, the US Department of Justice has a long history of abusing
data, especially concerning some topics.