by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
AOL's investigation into why the internet company published 20 million actual searches and bruised the privacy of 658,000 AOL customers has ended. The AOL board took the review that the CTO, Maureen Govern, was ultimately responsible for the blunder...and fired her.Andrew Girdwood
AOL hopes that the move will help to restore consumer confidence and trust in the company. Maureen Govern had held the position for less than a year.
Ironically Google, earlier this year, successfully defended itself against a subpoena from the United States' Department of Justice which sought to force the search engine to turn over its own search records. Yet only months later, AOL made the same data completely public without requirement.
Concerns over search engine privacy have been on the rise ever since Google announced that their Gmail product would show adverts alongside emails and target each based on an automated analysis of the email's content.
Search engines record and save each search carried out by a user for a number of reasons. Search engines evaluate relationships between words based on search frequencies and use that knowledge to improve their search results.
One patent application from Yahoo!, for instance, maps out the relationship between "hotels" and "motels" and "New York" all the way through to "law" and "enforcement" based entirely on search query intelligence.
Google offers users the option of having personalised search results. Google monitors the sites visited by the searcher and the searches they make. As Google begins to understand the style of site that the user visits most often, the search engine is able to give those sites preference in the personalised search results.
For example, a searcher with an interest in the FBI or history will be more likely to have sites about J. Edgar Hoover in their personalised search results than about the Hoover Dam if they search for just "Hoover".
AOL initially seemed to publish their search histories to encourage research in data mining techniques and get a number of supporting web pages to host discussion. Since the removal of the search data from AOL's own website, third party sites have provided search interfaces which specialise in mining the archive.
The search history had been designed to be anonymous but the sources of some searches could, and have, been tracked down. AOL search user "4417749" - now identified as Ms Arnold - was found and interviewed by the New York Times. So much for anonymity.
The website www.aolstalker.com was created to provide easy access to the recorded data and shows that Ms Arnold searched AOL for "care packages", "best dog for older owner" and the "Atlanta humane society".
In the search engine landscape, AOL has a small but non-trivial share of the marketplace and is responsible for about 5-6% of all searches. In the US, AOL offers search results which are enhanced by Google and which display Google's logo. In the UK AOL's homepage prominently displays a Google search box and offers Google powered results.
AOL recently announced that it would stop charging for some internet services in an attempt to encourage more users to use its web-based offerings. A thorough restructure and shake up of the company's ISP offering in Europe is expected.
