The Pentagon’s Darpa research agency is sponsoring a search challenge to individuals and groups in an effort to learn more about online behavior. The contest calls for people to find 10 red balloons which can be located anywhere in the continental United States.

The winner of the contest will receive a $40,000 prize, and it will go to the first person or group that successfully finds the locations of the 10 red balloons.

The contest starts on December 5, 2009.

The aim of the contest is to learn more about people’s social behavior on computer networks and the ways in which large networked teams use online resources and connections to compete with one another.

The date of the contest has a special significance as well – December 5th marks the 40th anniversary when the first four nodes of the Arpanet were connected. Arpanet is the military-created computer network that was the forerunner of the world wide web.

The red balloons will be visible from public roadways for a single day.

Search groups will probably use various tactics for finding the balloons, including: paying for information; developing software applications to help with the search and even possibly disseminating false information to competing groups about the location of the balloons.

Darpa plans to announce other large and small challenge contests in an effort to find new ways to tap into pools of talented people and groups. The contest is open to people and groups from anywhere in the world.

Interested people and groups can register for the Darpa Network Challenge contest before the Dec. 5 deadline @ Darpa.mil.

[ Source: New York Times Online ]

A recent article in Linux World discusses the expected Q4 launch of Wikipedia’s search engine challenge to Google and Yahoo.

From the article –

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is targeting the fourth quarter of this year for the unveiling of an open source search engine that he hopes could challenge the dominance of market leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

The project is being run through Wikia Inc., a for-profit company founded by Wales that seeks to use a similar model to the Wikipedia community-written and -edited encyclopedia. He hopes to provide the tools and technology to allow programmers across the Internet to collaborate on the development and testing of a search engine and make the results freely available.

“The essential core principles are that I think search is now a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet and it’s really fundamental to society as a whole, and therefore as citizens of the world we should be concerned about it being a secretive black box,” he said.

Source: Wikia targets Q4 unveiling of open source search engine

We wanted to share our two favorite search engine news sites with those of you whose professional and personal lives center around the use of search engines for web research, people searches and background checks.

Pandia Search Engine News and Search Engine Watch are two of the web’s best resources for the latest search engine news, information and tips.

Good luck with your searches!

The PI Buzz blog has published an informative post that lists information and links for some of the internet’s more popular private investigator and public record blogs.

You can access the post @ Blog proliferation – Private Investigators and Public Records.

The ChaCha search engine claims to be the world’s biggest live search site, where the search results are found for you by real people, who claim to be experts at web research.

Rather than rely on computer algorithms to find useful search results, the ChaCha search engine relies on thousands of human web searchers to weed out irrelevant information and find useful results for visitors.

You can try the Beta version of the ChaCha search engine @ ChaCha.com Search Engine.