As the information age comes to fruition, terrorist networks have moved mainstream by promoting their causes via the World Wide Web. In addition to their standard rhetoric, these organizations provide anyone with an Internet connection the ability to access dangerous information involving the creation and implementation of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Unfortunately for governments combating terrorism, IED education networks can be very difficult to find and even harder to monitor. Regular commercial search engines are not up to this task, as they have been optimized to catalog information quickly and efficiently for user ease of access while promoting retail commerce at the same time. This thesis presents a performance analysis of a new search engine algorithm designed to help find IED education networks using the Nutch open-source search engine architecture. It reveals which web pages are more important via references from other web pages regardless of domain. In addition, this thesis discusses potential evaluation and monitoring techniques to be used in conjunction with the proposed algorithm.

Many advantages of the Internetâ ease of access, limited regulation, vast potential audience, and fast flow of informationâ have turned it into the most popular way to communicate and exchange ideas. Criminal and terrorist groups also use these advantages to turn the Internet into their new play/battle fields to conduct their illegal/terror activities. There are millions of Web sites in different languages on the Internet, but the lack of foreign language search engines makes it impossible to analyze foreign language Web sites efficiently. This thesis will enhance an open source Web crawler with Arabic search capability, thus improving an existing social networking tool to perform page correlation and analysis of Arabic Web sites. A social networking tool with Arabic search capabilities could become a valuable tool for the intelligence community. Its page correlation and analysis results could be used to collect open source intelligence and build a network of Web sites that are related to terrorist or criminal activities.

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