You may don’t know yet that AOL released web search requests of 658,000 of their users (”20 million search inquiries collected over a three-month period”) on their research blog. Even the company declared that “This was a screw-up, and we’re angry and upset about it,” all of these precious requests are available publicly on other websites which have duplicated what had been released.
The potential of this data set is just huge, imagine that you can search for a brand, let’s say rolex and you’re able to see all the inquiries that the user has made, before and after his search activity. You can also monitor the evolution of his search behaviour and find out other brands, or daily concerns in which your customer is involved in.
Take for example the user 7322972 who made various search on rolex.com, you can see that this user is also interested in Land Rovers and many other highly segmented brands.
If you want to play around with this data set you can try this tool.
I’m sure that this kind of information can be really useful for some great on-line marketing agencies like this one, ic-agency (and by the way they have a really interesting blog).
