Machines Like Us

Artificial-intelligence-based search technology originally developed to help U.S. military and government agencies gather intelligence information from the so-called deep Web is now is finding a place in businesses looking for tool that can scour the Internet beyond the Web-crawling capabilities of Google or Yahoo.

An emerging group of companies, such as Fetch Technologies Inc., are focusing on building technologies that can harvest deep Web information ensconced in databases and behind forms that obscure it from traditional general search engines.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Air Force, the National Science Foundation and other agencies funded development of the Fetch technology by researchers at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute during the 1990s. A group of computer science professors who developed the core AI algorithms behind the Fetch Agent Platform founded the company in 1999 to build a commercial product.

Read full story at Computer World.