Ed Costello tipped us off to AOL Research's recent release of about 20 million web queries from 500,000 AOL customers.

Wow.

First, the good news: this could be a boon to researchers and, ultimately, anyone who designs information systems. Search analytics isn't a new concept, certainly not for web-wide searching. But thanks to AOL, we now have concrete and real data to experiment and play with, and use to demonstrate the power and value of search analytics to managers and other doubters.

The bad news: widespread concern and even anger over the release of private information. Even with AOL user IDs masked, there's apparently enough there to expose individual users and draw interest from those who would use the data unethically. See TechCrunch's coverage for an excellent critique. In fact, AOL may have pulled down the data in response to the outcry, although it's not yet clear if that's the case; anyway, the cat's out of the bag and is surely available via mirror sites.

Summary: AOL gets (yet another) black eye over this episode, and we all get a lesson on how careful we need to be with query data.