US defense researchers have built a ‘Dark Web’ search engine that can be used in combating human-trafficking activities. There is a possibility that it can play a role in business also.

“There's vast potential”, said Jeff Schneider, a research professor within the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. Carnegie Mellon was provided with a $3.6 million contract in order to work together on the project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is known as Memex. On Sunday, the Memex program was highlighted by a segment on 60 Minutes and an article in Scientific American.

According to Schneider, this program presently concentrates on human trafficking that was selected as the target domain. This technology can be useful in other fields. Schneider said that any algorithms they utilize to study human trafficking can be simply retargeted at other domains of people's interest.

All are familiar with what known as the ‘surface Web’, it is set of web pages that get accessed when anyone do searches through engines like Google. Those pages are available because they're linked to other public pages and also are usually visible to search engine crawlers, also known as spiders.

Dark Web is different because it's the set of Web pages that are not normally accessible to Web crawlers as they're too fleeting. The potential of the dark side of the Web might be considerable.

Memex may be utilized by stock analysts in order to search the Dark Web for information relevant to the stocks they cover. It could be used by wine experts in order to find the most recent information in that realm.