TOM FRANCIS
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A Woman’s Life In Search Queries

Somewhere between the recording someone made of AOL refusing to let them cancel their service and the story about the woman whose father AOL insisted on billing for nine months after his death – once telling his daughter to “shut up” when she protested – I missed the part where AOL released all thirty-six million search queries that five hundred thousand of their users made over the course of three months.

They replaced the usernames with numbers, but some people might have refrained from searching for their own name – and then ‘preteen lolitas naked’ – if they’d known their ISP planned to release their searches to the public. So far pretty much everyone who’s expressed disgust at this shocking a breach of privacy has also linked to mirrors of the data set or the searchable databases of it people have already put up.

But the privacy issue is far from the most interesting thing about the release of this data. That honour goes to User 711391. Every night for the three month period, when her husband’s snoring kept her awake (the very first entries set the scene), she searched for anything and everything that was on her mind. The four-thousand things she typed into that little white box over that period tell the story of her life in mercilessly candid detail, from the hard white pimple on her face she can’t seem to get rid of, to the extra-marital affair she has with a man she met online.

2006-03-04 how many online romances lead to sex in person

Like the huge majority of users, she has virtually no idea how to use a search engine, and ends up talking to it like a close friend or – more accurately – God. She never searches for terms that are likely to come up in the piece of information she’s looking for, she simply types her opinion or situation in. A huge proportion of them start with “is it ok to” – although sometimes she knows it isn’t, and just wants to know to what extent. As with God, we don’t get to see much of what the internet has to say back to her (the data names the domains of any sites she clicks on, but not the specific page she visited), but often her next search tells us what result her last one produced:

2006-03-26 can i wear makeup after cryosurgery
2006-03-26 best makeup remover

She’s religious, but frequently has trouble working out how the Bible relates to her life. She has children, and is worried Pop Rocks might be dangerous for them. A few times a week she has lesbian fantasies, always focused on cunnilingus. The male celebrities she’s most attracted to are all camp, gay, or in the case of Jake Gyllenhaal, play a gay character in a movie she loved but found unsettling and haunting. I’m not embellishing, she simply types everything she thinks or feels into that search box.

2006-03-01 how to kill annoying birds in your yards

2006-05-09 god cares for the sparrows

She agreed to meet a man she’d become friends with online. She was nervous about meeting him in person, and tried to obtain anxiety medicine to calm herself. She also feared that if she got her hair cut just before she met him, the haircut might go wrong, but she wanted to make it look fuller. They arranged to go to a concert together – she’d never been to one before, and didn’t know how long they usually lasted. They had sex. She was disappointed by how quickly he came, and he acted disgusted with her afterwards. She half-hoped he might have climaxed quickly because he found her very attractive, but he broke it off and she decided he used her solely for sex. The affair left her feeling incredibly empty.

2006-05-08 i met my cyber lover and the sex was not good
2006-05-08 online friend is horrible in person

2006-05-09 will ex lover contact me again
2006-05-09 i thought i could handle an affair but i couldn’t
2006-05-09 why would a man feel disgust with a woman after sex
2006-05-09 god can heal affairs

2006-05-12 i feel so damaged inside from an affair i had
2006-05-12 he used me for sex

Throughout this, the subplot of the pimple on her face obsesses her more than any of the sad drama of her love life. Every night she searches ten times or more for firstly what it is; then how to remove it; then how long the cryosurgery scar will take to heal; then whether her pores should be enlarged around it; then whether she can put make-up over it; and then – as you saw – how to remove the makeup it turns out she’d already put over it, since it now seems stuck on.

2006-05-15 how can you tell if your spouse put spyware on your computer

The weighted balance between this cosmetic concern, her infidelity, her children, and her fascination with female celebrities (she loves Neriah Davis but hates Brooke Burke, and cannot understand how they became friends) paints a painfully human picture of her neurotic, insecure, quiet, sad, desperate and probably entirely typical life. The irony is that she’s one of the users who never searches for her own name (unless she’s Hilary Swank, in which case she really has the hots for herself). I know more about her from the twenty minutes I spent invading her privacy before breakfast this morning than I think I have ever known about another human being, but I still don’t know who she is.

2006-05-16 so mad at myself for falling in love with someone and becoming so attached to them
2006-05-16 i got caught having an affair and the guy i got caught with is ignoring me now
2006-05-16 if he’s not contacting you he doesn’t want you in his life
2006-05-16 how to get him back

User 711391’s search history is funny, beautiful and intensely tragic, and the most incredible collection of words I’ve read in years. I’m hosting it here.