# AOL Leak : Deep-diving into hundreds of thousands of users' personal search histories
> read_time: 20 minutes
In 2006, the internet witnessed one of its first great data scandals. It wasn't a hack, but a colossal corporate mistake: AOL publicly released a "research dataset" exposing the private search histories of roughly 660,000 users. While our first instinct as data analysts is to aggregate this information to find broad trends, I will show you why that approach misses the point entirely. The real truth of this leak lies in the raw, sometimes heavy stories buried within individual logs.