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'Google Search On Steroids' Brings Dark Web To Light
snydeq writes The government agency that brought us the Internet has now developed a powerful new search engine that is shedding light on the contents of the so-called deep Web. DARPA began work on the Memex Deep Web Search Engine a year ago, and this week unveiled its tools to Scientific American and 60 Minutes. "Memex, which is being developed by 17 different contractor teams, aims to build a better map of Internet content and uncover patterns in online data that could help law enforcement officers and others. While early trials have focused on mapping the movements of human traffickers, the technology could one day be applied to investigative efforts such as counterterrorism, missing persons, disease response, and disaster relief."
My understanding is that these are two different (though related) things. The Deep Web is simply the part of the Web that's not indexed by the major search engines. It might be purposefully hidden, or it might simply be a web page so out of the way that Google hasn't noticed it. The Dark Web is a subset of the Deep Web that is more purposefully hidden because people using it don't want The Man to know what's going on. Sometimes the Dark Web is defined as only places in which nefarious (or at least illegal) things go on, sometimes it's any place that's intentionally hidden, for whatever reason.
Point is that the headline says "Dark Web" while the excerpt says "Deep Web", but then immediately starts talking about law enforcement, which means Dark Web.
"Deep Web" and "Dark Web" are both useful concepts. We should avoid conflating them.
It's 17 teams working on 17 different things. The way these projects work is they've got a bunch of contractors that have ideas they want to pursue that are relevant to DARPAs interests and requirements. DARPA funds them and they all work on their own things and try to create some synergy. Over the life of the contract they continue funding those projects that are most successful.