Inside the Mind of a Searcher: Free Keyword Research Search Data
AOL proved stupid by potentially violating the privacy of 650,000 searchers and the 20 million searches they did over a 3 month period earlier this year. While seasonal and limited to AOL data, this ties data together between searcher and search patterns as well as searches and relevant sites.
Imagine combining Alexa, Hitwise, and Wordtracker, and making it all free :)
The original data source has been pulled, but mirrors are up.
Comments
@Mavrick;
it would be nice to know how many people are actually searching for google on google.com .. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a big search term...
Well this is really a nice database, this would certainly help us know what and how people search.
Great!
i'm still processing the globs of data...
a gold mine!
markus at plentyoffish has some interesting preliminary observations...
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/
How are you all opening this file? It seems to be a bit too heavy for wordpad? Any ideas?
You can try www.textpad.com which should be able to open it.
Wordpad?
Import it into a database app so you can tool around with it...
JK
Hi,
I could be of interest to be able to search on past months too (like in google trends).
Best regards,
whohw, Im really looking forward to more analysis and conclusions of people analyzing this data (currently downloading it myself)
this data is very interesting. But i'm afraid that this will lead to more mfa sites
I thought I'd post a comment whilst it's downloading in the background....A hefty file but like Nick says, it's a gold mine. Also thanks to Nick for the link to plentyoffish.
Think I'll make a pot of coffee and wait for the results to come down :D
For those of you who can’t download or store the AOL data.. Here is an Overture-like tool that shows top 1000 results for any give keyword/phrase. The tool then allows you to view the websites clicked and their average page placement. They DON’T show the user data for privacy concerns..
This seems to be a great tool for SEO
http://www.dontdelete.com
Rob, are you sure? -- when I use the"Random User Search" I seem to get user data just fine.
Shameless plug ...
http://www.askthebrain.com/aol/www.cbs.com
Great tool searching the AOL data to find the keywords people type to find the specified site. For example I put in www.cbs.com and it returned the queries that resulted in a clickthru to cbs. Good keyword research tool.
Generates the competitive info I am after.
Top 50 clicked queries:
264646 google
107473 yahoo
71536 ebay
61501 yahoo.com
61188 myspace
57465 mapquest
54454 myspace.com
53236 google.com
26871 www.google.com
25537 www.yahoo.com
24866 my space
19290 bank of america
18366 www.myspace.com
17234 hotmail
16361 msn
16085 ask jeeves
15378 craigslist
15184 yahoo mail
14441 map quest
13091 bankofamerica
12780 msn.com
11316 dictionary
11277 hotmail.com
11128 myspace layouts
11017 southwest airlines
10156 weather
9949 ask.com
9881 my space.com
9831 walmart
9481 american idol
9423 mapquest.com
9227 fidelity.com
8180 ebay.com
8118 lyrics
7599 maps
7331 qvc
6579 pogo
6433 target
6420 yahoo games
6189 white pages
5907 florida lottery
5777 runescape
5770 irs
5551 yellow pages
5413 wachovia
5240 www.hotmail.com
5041 home depot
5004 lowes
4821 horoscopes
4722 espn
Thanks for sharing.
I find it ironic that even though AOL has been using Google results for over, what 3+ years now, user still search for Google to do their searching instead of just searching within AOL.
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