A couple of weeks ago AOL made a(nother) big mistake. They released a big pile of people's web search queries. Beware naive netizens, every time you search for whatever brand of filth turns you on on the Big Bad Internet, the chances are that some record of it is made.

AOL saw a large potential in academic tech researchers having access to a big clump of these real world usage examples of their search. So for a few days, anyone could download a file of 20,000,000ish searches done by 658,000 of their customers.

They obscured the identifiers of their customers to preserve anonymity, but of course it did little of the sort. They had assigned each user a random number in the public file, but the number was consistent to the user. That is to say, if you saw that user 192 had searched for "dogs" and then later on there is an entry for user 192 searching for "cats", you can be sure that it was the same AOL account that was used, and hence very likely the same person. This is probably a higher level of information than Google refused to give the US Department of Justice earlier this year (yes, Google, along with all other major providers, keep this sort of information).

The problem occurs because people are naturally drawn to search for things to do with themselves. Maybe you search for a pizza shop near to you, maybe you search for a house to buy, a vet for your cat and so on. Moreover, who hasn't ever tried vanity-searching for themselves or their local area? So when you can see that user x searched for "Billy Smith", "Gardners in Crewe" and, if you're lucky, "STDs" you can make a fairly decent stab at who that might be, where they live and what disease they may have. Privacy over.

User 4417749: "Anonymous"In case you're not believing it's quite that simple, it is. In fact, as proof of concept, the New York Times managed to work out who AOL user 4417749 actually was and give her a call. Thelma Arnold, the user in question, is reportedly "disillusioned" with AOL at this flagrant exposure of her and her interests - which apparently include "dog that urinates on everything".

AOL, having outraged many - especially in the blogosphere - realised their error and removed the data, but only after several days. They have subsequently apologised as a company and sacked three people who had some responsibility for the misjudgement. It hasn't really solved the problem though because of course in these days of making everything a matter of public record and/or humiliation, a pile of people downloaded the whole file before AOL worked out the mistake.

In fact, should you want to, you can join the gang, you can still download it from non-AOL sources all over the Internet. Should you not be wanting to wait for roughly half a gigabyte of data to be funnelled through your two-bit phoneline, some data-wizard has made an online searchable version of the whole file. You should however be warned that it is entirely unfiltered and hence contains the worst of the Internet language and the sickest of "interests". It is not only Not Safe For Work but not suitable for "minors" either.

For those more grown-up, and at least slightly sick themselves, somethingawful.com has produced something awful (.com) in their AOL Search Log Special (now with added part 2). In a part hilarious, in a much greater part sick, twisted and of great concern to decent thinking citizens, they kindly present some of the wilder users and their searches.

Vaguely family-friendly entries include:

• What are the signals that a dog is in a sexual relationship with a woman
• Grow more fingers
• i went online because windows couldnt find my server up to date for my sony cd-r.i have been around to many sites trying to sellme assistance.if this is what this is all about ill just throw this dam computer out of the window. can someone please help me
• stool passing through uretha

and several extremely worrying incidences of things like a single user searching for "preteen nude pics" followed up by "church youth groups" together with a touch of overt and ultra offensive racism. Eergh.

It's almost enough to make you think we should have Thought Police. SomethingAwful's article is NSFW, not safe for under 18s and possibly Not Safe For Anyone At All. If you're feeling reticent to go visit that atrocity, you could instead always go look at someone who is clearly net-researching prior to committing a nice case of matrimonial murder. Ah, humanity...