I'm sure that by now, everybody has heard about the AOL search data that was recently released. Being curious, I downloaded a copy of the data for my own perusal. I paged through some of the searches, and while amusing, others have done a much better job of the general analysis.

So I thought I'd search for myself in there, to see whether anybody was looking for me. I found four searches that ended up at my web site:

2922007     what is my name in chinese  2006-04-11 18:38:16     7       http://www.hewgill.com
2922007     what is my name in chinese  2006-04-11 18:38:16     7       http://www.hewgill.com
6750300     my name in chinese          2006-05-09 18:37:24     7       http://www.hewgill.com
17413988    earth lines and grids       2006-05-07 14:31:13     6       http://www.hewgill.com

The AOL logs don't say which exact page the search found on my server, but the first three almost certainly refer to this journal entry. The last one probably led to the xearth documentation (that's where Google goes for the same search query).

I looked up the timestamps of these searches in my own web server logs, but I couldn't find any matching hits. I presume that AOL's web cache already had a copy of the pages and served that to the users.

Anyway, this confirmed an unsurprising fact: Nobody on AOL was looking for me during the months of march through may of this year. What a relief!