There's no Google for the little known "Dark Web" which, unknown to many, comprises an astounding 90 percent of the World Wide Web. Google only accesses 10 percent of the visible web, or the segment known as the "Surface Web".

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has now developed a search engine for the Dark Web that's part of a larger project called "Memex".

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The Dark Web contains most of the electronic information in the Web. It's that set of Web pages not ordinarily accessible to Web crawlers such as those used by Google to obtain information because these Dark Web pages are too ephemeral.

DARPA's Dark Web search engine will crawl the Web and find pages not indexed by Google, said Jeff Schneider, a research professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science.

"There's huge potential," said Schneider referring to the Dark Web.

Carnegie Mellon received a $3.6 million contract to work on the project at DARPA.

The Memex program is a three-year research initiative to develop software for domain-specific indexing of open, public Web content and domain-specific search capabilities.

The Dark Web search engine will first be used to help combat crime, specifically human-trafficking activities. Schneider said law enforcement already uses the Dark Web technology developed by his team.

"The program right now is focused on human trafficking-that was chosen as the target domain," Schneider said. "Any algorithms we can use to study human trafficking can easily be retargeted at other domains of people's interest."

But it's the other potentials of this special search engine that exciting government and business.

The Dark Web search engine could be used to uncover fraud and other illicit activity in the business world. It could also be used by stock analysts to search for information relevant to the stocks they cover.

DARPA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military. DARPA has been responsible for funding the development of many technologies which have had a major effect on the world, including computer networking that led to the Internet and GPS.