Researchers at NASA have joined the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project to harness the benefits of ‘Deep Web’ searching for science.

The project is known as Memex. It would be helpful in listing the vast amounts of data that NASA spacecraft deliver every day.

Chris Mattmann, principal investigator of Memex at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that they are working on the development of next-generation search technologies, which will be able to understand people, places, things and the connections between them.

‘Memex’ has the ability to check not only the standard text-based content online but also images, videos, pop-up ads, forms and scripts. Other ways information is stored in it to look at how they are interrelated.

Mattmann explained, “We are augmenting web crawlers to behave like browsers in other words, executing scripts and reading ads in ways that you would when you usually go online. This information is normally not catalogued by search engines”.

Furthermore in the case of a standard web search, it does not get much information from images and videos, but the case is not the same with Memex, which can recognize what is in this content and will pair it with searches on the same subjects.

The search tool could easily recognize the same object in many frames of a video or even different videos.

One day soon, the video and image search capabilities of Memex could prove useful in space missions, taking photos, videos and other kinds of imaging data with instruments such as spectrometers.

The authors also noted that the search of visual information regarding a particular planetary body could greatly ease the work of scientists in analyzing geological features.