DARPA Launches Improved Web Search Program

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has asked for proposals to help improve Web searches for defense and other agencies and eventually the public. Initially, the system would be used to help the government combat human trafficking, a factor in many types of military, law enforcement, and intelligence investigations that frequently uses the Web to attract customers, according to DARPA.

According to Government security news the goal is for users to be able to extend the reach of current search capabilities and quickly and thoroughly organize subsets of information based on individual interests, according to DARPA. The program, called Memex (a combination of “memory” and “index”), seeks to produce search results that are more immediately useful to specific domains and tasks.

IHLS – Israel Homland Security

Today’s Web searches use a centralized, “one-size-fits-all” approach that searches the Internet with the same set of tools for all queries, according to DARPA. It still remains largely a manual process that requires nearly exact input with “one-at-a-time entry, and doesn’t organize or aggregate results beyond a list of links.” In addition, common search practices miss information in the deep web — or parts of the web not indexed by standard commercial search engines — and frequently ignore shared content across pages. While that model has been wildly successful commercially, according to DARPA it does not work well for many government use cases.