The CIA didn't invent search engines or the idea of crawling and indexing, and these conspiracy theories are rather pointless. Completely open source, public, s

The CIA didn't invent search engines or the idea of crawling and indexing, and these conspiracy theories are rather pointless. Completely open source, public, search engines would have existed. It's like saying, if the CIA funded a college department that invented USENET/UUCP, they then therefore had planned all along to create great online chat communities just so that they could easily mine it, a kind of uber honey-pot hypothesis. It could also be that the CIA just in general, funds lots of stuff, just like DARPA, just like the DOE, they hand out tons of grants because they are flooded with proposals, and they don't always have a master plan on what they think the outcome or use will be. Just like ARPA's work on the internet was motivated by nuclear war, but the outcome was not at all what the original envisioned use is. Sometimes, the government agencies are just conducting a kind of VC investing in academia and hoping something useful pops out. Maybe we can leave the Dr Joe Rogan MD conspiracies in the moon landing hoax bin in favor of simpler hypotheses.