Providing search server logs to a researcher

Khadija Elbedweihy, a student/researcher from the University of Sheffield has asked us to provide a months worth of our search server logs for research purposes. Khadija says the following about her research:

What my research is trying to do is finding out what kind of queries issued on linked data, what are their complexities and other statistics as well. This might go into another work which is for evaluating search tools working on linked data. So I’d use my analysis to see how we can best define evaluation queries that are based on real world usage and scenarios.

We have the logs and its easy for us to provide these logs for research purposes — and we like supporting research, especially if we can benefit from it. 🙂

We just need one final OK from our community that we’re not doing something stupid and/or betraying the trust/privacy of our users. I’ve created a tiny except of the two types of logs we propose to send to Khadija. The source IP addresses and any other information have been removed from the data — the only thing that remains are the timestamps when the request occurred and the URL that was requested. And these URLs do not contain any information that could identify our users in any way. That is it — we’d be providing no other information to Khadija.

Please take a look at the excerpt and sanity check us to make sure we’re not pulling an AOL here. 🙂