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Opinion
The AOL Data Release: A Tipping Point?
8/16/2006
But with “East Liverpool,” I did find a personal connection! Many of the searches were by user No. 18923, looking for “ east liverpool ohio online schooling.” Maybe even most of the 70 searches were on this topic. It relates to be because my brother, Randy, is not the director of the Buckeye On-Line School for Success, which is headquartered in East Liverpool. (I wrote about its precursor in Pennsylvania some time ago.) But it g'es to show, once more, the inanity of some AOL users when you realize that the user in question searched on the exact same phrase something like 40 times over a couple of days. Did they expect something to change? Why not vary a word or two? Who knows.
“Karl Rove”: Well, these are not exactly political activists whose search strings we can now peek at. “Karl Rove” was searched for exactly 14 times out of 20,000,000+. In the five searches that combined “Karl Rove” with “indictment,” “indictment” (sic) was misspelled three times.
On the other hand, “Hillary Clinton” was searched for 93 times, “Bill Clinton,” 123 times, “John McCain” 29 times, “Dick Cheney” 12 times, and of course “George Bush,” 426 times.
“Lolita,” on the other hand, was searched for 1,108 times. One hopes those searchers can in fact be identified and that they are sweating it out. I don’t mean those who may have been researching the book, but those who are looking for “preteen Lolita sex.”
“Porn” was searched for 15,491 times. The first few responses served up by the AOL Stalker site indicate people looking for “free porn,” “midget porn,” and “preteen porn pics.”
“Ann Coulter”: Dang, she was searched for 145 times. I guess hatred is of more interest to these folks than politics, although a number of the searches were for (shudder) “ann coulter nude.” (The same person searched for “cher nude.”) And only 4 searches for “Maureen Dowd,” none of them including the word “nude.”
And more of these weird, repeated searches. User No. 2067984 searched for “ann coulter” 69 times between 3:14am on March 6 through 3:39am on the same day. Why? I just don’t get this.
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