For those of you who are not connected to online technology news, here is some background: recently, AOL published a gigantic list of search terms (what people are searching for) of their users that they have collected for about 3 months. Here’s just one article of many about this issue. It was a stupid act, and AOL quickly withdrew the file. However, as things usually happen with the Internet, once you have something interesting online it won’t go away for a long time (ask the poor Star Wars Kid). So people started poking into the data AOL published and soon enough, even though the data was anonymous (users were referenced by IDs, e.g. “user no. 312431”), real users were identified (the first one was this nice 62 year-old widow (NY Times article, free registration required)).
Now, Paul Boutin published an article following an analysis of the data, which outlines the seven ways people search the web, or the seven “types” of users according to their searches. So… are you a Pornhound? ;-) (via Slashdot)