AOL customers use Twingine too

AOL has released search usage data for a selection of AOL users in the period between March 1st and May 31st, 2006. There has been some controversy regarding the insufficient anonymization of the search data, and some of the users have been identified from the data.

The web site aolstalker.com gives a per-user view of the search data, in addition to the possibility to see who, if any, searched for a given term.

Searching for "twingine" revealed that two of the AOL customers sampled in the data used Twingine in the time period of the sample.

A note on privacy: Twingine is run by an individual, not a business, on a personal computer in a private residence in a country with strong privacy laws (Norway). As such, the data is much more protected than if a corporation was responsible for the hosting or operation of the service.

Yahoo! and Google have however been subjected to subpoenas in the past for search data. Google refused to comply.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation have more information on the AOL case.

Jaguhugel will disappear in 90 days

At the same time I registered Twingine, I also registered Jaguhugel, a similar-sounding site to Yagoohoogle (at least in Norwegian).

It is currently serving around 500 searches a month, and I won't be renewing the domain when it expires on May 7th. If you like the domain you could either Donate $32.95 to keep it up another year, or start using Twingine instead.

I will renew the domain for as many years as I receive donations, and the donors will receive honorable mentions on the Jaguhugel front page!

Yahoo! Hacks author Paul Bausch mentions Twingine

Paul Bausch's book Yahoo! Hacks mentions Twingine in Hack #9. Take a look at Yahoo hacks - Insider Secrets - CNET.com, tip #3:

Viewing both sets of results in different windows is a bit tedious, and a clever Norwegian developer named Asgeir S. Nilsen has made the task easier at a site called Twingine.

The Twingine site contains a blank search form where you can type any search query. When you click Search, the site brings up the results pages for that query from both Yahoo and Google, side by side. For fairness, Twingine randomly changes the sides that Google and Yahoo come up on, so people who prefer one side of the screen over the other won't be biased.

Twingine in your language

I haven't come around to translating Twingine, but you can have Twingine use your localized versions of Yahoo and Google. To use this, you can use the url http://twingine.com/?CC where CC is your country code. I have tested it for no, se, fi, dk, de, uk, and in, and they all work. Please comment if your particular country code does not work. Thanks to Jamie Chilvers for the suggestion. If you have a search box on your site, you need to add a hidden attribute like this:

<input type="hidden" name="lang" value="CC"/>

June statistics

The total number of queries were 1,570,923, with a peak on the 6th and 7th. The daily average number of queries were 52,321.

Top 20 queries

559107	'250碼 漆彈'
10465	'failure'
9687	'@ms28.hinet.net'
2406	'yagoohoogle'
2081	'twingine'
2049	'sex'
1870	'google'
1671	'test'
1243	'yahoo'
747	'"play aware networks"'
699	'canrize'
655	'hello'
570	'academic google'
507	'สุนทรภู่'
491	'oneillgraphics'
491	'biomes blog'
464	'a'
457	'hi'
406	'grid computing'
403	'games'

Top 20 netblocks

451584	61.62.0.0/16
351383	202.0.0.0/7
20358	212.138.47.0/24
12924	85.96.0.0/12
12114	200.128.0.0/9
9779	220.140.0.0/16
8514	66.0.0.0/8
7553	61.56.0.0/13
7495	203.200.0.0/16
6955	216.0.0.0/8
6635	212.138.64.0/22
6197	82.224.0.0/11
5283	198.0.0.0/8
4588	12.0.0.0/8
4487	61.90.0.0/15
4200	82.194.32.0/19
4114	81.192.0.0/16
3853	222.124.0.0/16
3788	203.199.0.0/16
3517	196.0.0.0/8

Top 20 countries

Since last month, Australia has beaten the U.S. for second position.

488970	TW
362796	AU
191998	US
47967	IN
44004	TR
42789	FR
33101	SA
28602	TH
26274	IL
21554	JP
21519	GB
20133	DE
17971	BR
15058	EU#COUNTRYISREALLYSOMEWHEREINAFRICANREGION
15002	CA
10569	GR
10135	CH
9908	ID
8936	IR
8859	IT

Tags: twingine

YaGoohoo!gle's final month — and Twingine's first

The stats are in.

Top ten IP addresses

The actual addresses are not revealed, but here is the WHOIS information on which corporation owns the ten IP addresses performing most queries on yagoohoogle and twingine:

472572	Sony Network Taiwan Limited
27810	Ci Mei Electron Co., Ltd., Taiwan
22546	Sony Network Taiwan Limited
19787	KSC Commercial Internet Co.,Ltd., Thailand
13377	Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications
12601	C.S.Communications Co., Ltd., Thailand
11828	Jasmine Internet Co.,Ltd., Thailand
10997	Batelco, Bahrain
9157	CAT Telecom Public Company Ltd, Thailand
7490	Saudi Network Information Center, ISU, Saudi Arabia

Top 20 network blocks

473940	61.62.0.0/16
342906	202.0.0.0/7
40301	212.138.47.0/24
32192	200.128.0.0/9
31097	61.220.0.0/14
25813	61.56.0.0/13
24543	85.96.0.0/12
21564	66.0.0.0/8
15350	12.0.0.0/8
14957	198.0.0.0/8
11701	82.224.0.0/11
11218	209.0.0.0/8
11050	82.194.32.0/19
11034	216.0.0.0/8
11002	81.192.0.0/16
10956	212.138.64.0/22
10597	168.0.0.0/8
8655	203.200.0.0/16
7811	67.160.0.0/11
7322	201.0.0.0/12

Top 20 countries

I got hits from a total of 171 different countries. The top 20 were:

613237	TW
497762	US
370648	AU
102944	IN
93858	TR
80438	FR
61232	SA
52499	JP
51357	GB
45202	BR
40687	DE
40039	CA
37726	EU#COUNTRYISREALLYSOMEWHEREINAFRICANREGION
32379	IL
31779	TH
22910	IR
21591	ES
18731	GR
16316	ID
15604	AE

Hits

This month, the number of hits has been quite stable. However, when Twingine started, it started receiving the same volume of hits as YaGoohoogle, som the traffic actually nearly doubled! The Twingine traffic is more stable, though.

Top 20 queries

There were a total of 2,552,815 queries – 964,404 of these occurred only once. Aside from the top query (is that obscene?), the actual queries are quite distributed.

526278	'250碼 �¼å½'
9353	'yagoohoogle'
5300	'test'
4767	'sex'
3778	'google'
3173	'yahoo'
2132	'hello'
2030	'Thanks!'
1522	'hi'
1520	'cars'
1459	'between the appalachians and the ozarks is'
1361	'SYSTRAN-Premium-5_0.rar'
1181	'a'
1154	'123'
1153	'twingine'
1045	'games'
979	'apple'
961	'car'
950	'porn'
949	'fuck'

Add a Twingine search box to your site

Here is the HTML code for adding a Twingine search box to your site:

<form style="text-align:center;" method="get"
action="http://twingine.com/search.php">
<input type="text" name="q" size="16"/>
<input type="submit" value="Twingine Search"/>
</form>