A project had been announced by the U.S government’s Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) last year which was to create a search engine that is powerful enough to dig deep in the web and bring out those websites that are not indexed by Google and other commercial search engines.
The search engine that will fight against cybercrime is on its way and is named as Memex Deep Web Search Engine. On Sunday night, we had the opportunity to peak into this crime-fighter. Scientific American got the opportunity to view the search engine by previewing the software while 60 minutes got the chance to look at the exquisite technology.
It is certain that deep down in the web, there are numerous illegal activities going on ranging from child pornography, drug deals, Cyber-crime to human trafficking. Since the dark side of the web is so far down into the pits that it is far out of the reach of major search engines, however, that was until now.
Now the internet will be protected by Memex Search Engine that will prevent hackers, human traffickers and other criminals from affecting the web. While developing the search engine, it was kept in mind that it should surpass the above challenges and extend the reach of current search engine capabilities while organizing subsets of information quickly based on individual interests.
Chris White, the inventor of the search engine had a discussion with Lesley Stahl and producer Shachar Bar-On about this Dark Net Search Engine and told how it works and how it is a revolutionary thing in the field of law enforcement investigations.
White told that people underestimate the size of the internet. Some estimates suggest that search engines like Google, Mirosoft’s Bing and Yahoo only allow the user to access 5% of the total content on the internet. This means that criminals have a lot of space for conducting unlawful activities.
DARPA innovation head Dan Kaufman said on 60 minutes about the Memex search engine and represented the software as something that makes the unseen seen.
Kaufman also said that although there are many people on the internet doing kind things, there are at the same time many parasites and that he and his team are working on to prevent them to use the internet against us and so make this world a better place.
Watch the CBS video about MEMEX search engine:
A nongovernmental organization, a law enforcement agency and two district attorneys’ offices are beta testing the Memex search engine. A much wider group will be doing a beta test in a few weeks and that would be the next stage of testing.
One aim of this round of testing is to test the new image search capabilities so that photos can be examined even when portions of it that are helpful to the investigators are hidden. This was in a report by Scientific American. The second target is to bring in different user interfaces and to experiment with streaming architectures that evaluate time-sensitive data.
This implies that MEMEX search Engine will enable DARPA to track criminals by just looking at the reflections in TV screens just like the way it is done in Hollywood movies. It was highlighted that DARPA is doing great effort to prevent human traffickers from harming more people.
