Forwarded From: blueskyt_private http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/13715.html >From Criminals to Web Crawlers by Kristen Philipkoski 4:00am 15.Jul.98.PDT A crime-fighting search engine used to fight terrorism and insurance scams may soon find a home at one of the Web's top search engines. The system, called VCLAS, has helped detectives crack cases all over the world. "In 11 days, the PhoneFraud software helped law-enforcement agencies in New York uncover US$1.2 billion in stolen services," said Jay Valentine, president and CEO of InfoGlide, the company that owns the VCLAS software package. The software is built around a "Similarity Search Engine," which thrives on imperfect and complex information, data that engineer David Wheeler said often stumps search algorithms based on neural networks. Similarity searching is well-suited to crime work, Wheeler said, because investigations are often inherently random and disconnected. For instance, if police are looking for a red vehicle, but a witness says it was maroon, a traditional keyword search wouldn't register a match since it couldn't recognize that the colors are similar. -o- Subscribe: mail majordomot_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: New Dimensions International [www.newdimensions.net]
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