DARPA looking to create new search engine to comb deep web, combat human trafficking, etc.

02/11/2014 - 00:00

By Richard Chirgwin

The military, researchers, and spooks have long known of the value of public domain information, and now DARPA wants to create a search engine to out-Google-Google in the business of organising that information.

The agency has put out a call for developers to work on “domain-specific indexing, domain-specific search, and DoD-specified applications”.

DARPA's complaint is that the Internet search paradigm isn't really so useful for a specialist: going after information with Google “remains a largely manual process that does not save sessions, requires nearly exact input with one-at-a-time entry, and doesn't organize or aggregate results beyond a list of links,” the agency says.

The agency also remarks that the so-called “deep web” is missed by standard search engines (hence the name), and that search engines like Google and Bing “ignore shared content across pages”.

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