By Nathan Weinberg

Greg Linden reports that AOL has shut down their research department, following the big search privacy scandal that emanated from that department. Now, one commenter says on of the people they fired after the scandal basically was the whole department, but if AOL was serious about trying some research efforts, it is still disheartening to see them give up on it. AOL has so much customer data that could be a wealth of knowledge in the hands of the right researchers. Maybe they could outsource all their customer data to Google, which owns 5% of AOL anyway, as long as Google remains as tight-lipped as we all know them to be.

By the by, if you want to talk about some interesting data, Greg’s been writing about a paper Google released about Bigtable, Google’s massive and robust distributed database system. In his latest post, he notes that the paper cites Google’s web crawl as containing 850 terabytes of data, while Google Analytics has 250 terabytes. Is it just me, or does that seem like a big waste given that (a) Google search earns billions of dollars and (b) Google Analytics loses money. Hmm…