Computer search engine thwarts terrorism.

• Position: YOUR LIFE

As part of an effort to anticipate--and thwart--the plans of potential terrorists, the Federal Aviation Administration is supporting the development of a new search engine by University at Buffalo (N.Y.) scientists that is designed to detect "hidden" information that can be gleaned from public websites.

The system permits users to find the best trail of evidence through many documents that connect two or more apparently unrelated concepts. Existing search engines process individual documents based on the number of times a key word appears. In contrast, the new system is based on the construction of concept chain graphs that search for the best path connecting two concepts within a multitude of documents.

With regular searches, the input is a set of key words. The search produces a ranked list of documents, any one of which could satisfy the query. On the other hand, this engine is a...