The U.S. military is taking on Google, Bing, and Yahoo with a powerful new tool to search the "dark Web."

A year after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled Memex, the program is making headlines for its help in catching human traffickers.

As reported by Scientific American, the experimental tool provided advanced Internet search capabilities that helped the New York County District Attorney's Office secure a conviction in a two-year-old case.

DARPA revealed Memexa combination of the words "memory" and "index"in February 2014, with plans to fight human trafficking, with a focus on forums, chats, advertisements, job postings, and other Web-based platforms used to lure victims.

"We're envisioning a new paradigm for search that would tailor indexed content, search results and interface tools to individual users and specific subject areas, and not the other way around," Chris White, DARPA program manager, said in a statement last year.

Working with 17 teams of researchers from businesses and universities, the agency built Memex to dig deeper than commercial search engines, scouring the so-called "deep Web" for untouched information, according to Scientific American.

Some of that information is being collected by Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. The three-year, $3.6 million effort, dubbed Traffic Jam, develops algorithms to analyze Web-based ads for sex services.

"In the end, sex traffickers are trying to sell a service and ultimately they have to advertise those services. That's their Achilles' heel," Jeff Schneider, the project's principal investigator and CMU research professor, said in a statement.

"Originally, we looked for ways to help the victims of human trafficking," said Artur Dubrawski, senior systems scientists and the project's co-principal investigator. "But we quickly realized the best way to help the victims would be to help law enforcement."

DARPA's program can also help crack down on online marketplaces for illicit drugs and other contraband, CMU's Schneider suggested.

For more, check out PCMag's look Inside the Dark Web.

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