AOL Turning Into A Technology Company?

AOL have just announced their research site. From there there are links to a number of API pages and data sets. I hadn't thought of AOL in this light before. They are also present at SIGIR, where I imagine they are recruiting. Abdur Chowdhury posted to the Corpora mailing list:

AOL is embarking on a new direction for its business - making its
content and products freely available to all consumers.  To support
those goals, AOL is also embracing the vision of an open research
community, which is creating opportunities for researchers in academia
and industry alike.

We are introducing AOL Research to everyone, with the goal of
facilitating closer collaboration between AOL and anyone with a desire
to work on interesting problems.   To get started, we invite you to
visit us at http://research.aol.com, where you will find:

- 20,000 hand labeled, classified queries
- 3.5 million web question/answer queries (who, what, where, when, etc.)
- Query streams for 500,000 users over 3 months (20 million queries)
- Query arrival rates for queuing analysis
- 2 million queries against US Government domains

Also, please feel free to provide feedback on the site, datasets you'd
like to see in the future, and any other comments about our vision.

Thanks,

Abdur Chowdhury