Interactive discovery and retrieval of web resources containing home made explosive recipes

Abstract

This work investigates the effectiveness of a novel interactive search engine in the context of discovering and retrieving Web resources containing recipes for synthesizing Home Made Explosives (HMEs). The discovery of HME Web resources both on Surface and Dark Web is addressed as a domain-specific search problem; the architecture of the search engine is based on a hybrid infrastructure that combines two different approaches: (i) a Web crawler focused on the HME domain; (ii) the submission of HME domain-specific queries to generalpurpose search engines. Both approaches are accompanied by a user-initiated post-processing classification for reducing the potential noise in the discovery results. The design of the application is built based on the distinctive nature of law enforcement agency user requirements, which dictate the interactive discovery and the accurate filtering of Web resources containing HME recipes. The experiments evaluating the effectiveness of our application demonstrate its satisfactory performance, which in turn indicates the significant potential of the adopted approaches on the HME domain.