Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput – Computer network managing – Computer network monitoring
Reexamination Certificate
1998-05-26
2001-02-06
Matar, Ahmad F. (Department: 2758)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput
Computer network managing
Computer network monitoring
C709S203000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06185614
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates in general to computer software, and in particular to a method and system for collecting profile information about users accessing Web pages from a plurality of Web servers. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system by which user profile information can be collected when the Web content is generated dynamically for each request at the Web server.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
In the World-Wide Web, a content provider deploys a plurality of Web servers that deliver Web pages to clients. When requesting a Web page, the client supplies a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or Universal Resource Identifier (URI) to the server. The server associates this URI with a particular page of content and delivers that information to the requesting client.
As the World-Wide Web is being used increasingly to support commerce and targeted advertising, content providers desire to collect information about which users are accessing the site and what site content those users are accessing. This information can be used to establish “profiles” for each site visitor and enable tuning of the Web site content to meet the visitors' interests. Traditionally, this visitor information is collected by the Web server or a proxy server in the form of a log file. This log file contains, among other things, the requesting host address, the requested URI, and the time at which the request was received. Because each URI represents a particular piece of static content at the Web site, the URI is sufficient for a user profile analyzer to evaluate which content was received by each user and to detect similarities among the behavior of different users.
Recent Web servers are providing support for server-side scripting, whereby the URI is associated with a program or script that is executed at the Web server. This script is responsible for receiving the URI and the user identity and using this information to dynamically generate the content that should be returned to the requesting user. This generated content may account for the user's previous behavior at the site, his access permissions, his demographic information, or any number of other factors. Dynamic server content is supported by most Web servers today, including Microsoft's Active Server Pages, Sun's Dynamic Server Pages, industry-standard servlets, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executables, and other mechanisms.
As a result of this direction, a particular URI can no longer be associated with particular content at the Web site. On different requests, the URI may return wholly different content depending on the requesting user and the context in which the request was issued. Consequently, existing methods for capturing user information are insufficient for producing meaningful user profiles. More specifically, the reliance on URIs alone prevents the accurate characterization of which users are exhibiting similar access behavior. Therefore, a method is needed for efficiently collecting user access information in the presence of dynamically-generated content at a Web server, in order to support the accurate generation of user profiles.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
One object of the present invention is to provide, within a networked environment, a method of associating each user's request for World-Wide Web information to the content of the retrieved document when that document was generated dynamically.
Another object of the present invention is to group together user requests that retrieve the same document content. Yet another object of the present invention is to ignore minor variations in document content as might occur when the documents differ only in the presence of the requesting user's name. Still yet another object of the present invention is to enable the use of a range of metrics for comparing two documents for similarity.
To achieve the foregoing objects and in accordance with the purpose of the invention as broadly described herein, a method and system are disclosed for collecting information about user accesses by analyzing the content of retrieved documents and associating Document Comparators with each document. These and other features, aspects, and advantages of the present invention will become better understood with reference to the following description, appended claims, and accompanying drawings.
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Cuomo Gennaro A.
Nguyen Binh Q.
Singhal Sandeep K.
Caldwell Andrew
Clay A. Bruce
International Business Machines Corp.
Matar Ahmad F.
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