Systems and methods for inferring uniform resource locator (URL) normalization rules

A system for determining a rule applicable to uniform resource locators (URLs) corresponding to a plurality of web resources, comprising:

• a web crawler to receive the web resources from at least one web site on a web server;
• and
• a processor to receive the content of the web resources, grouping web resources by content so that each group comprises all of the web resources from the at least one web site that have substantially identical content, wherein each group of substantially identical web resources is referred to as an equivalence class, analyzing URLs corresponding to all substantially identical web resources in an equivalence class to determine a per equivalence class URL rewrite rule applicable to the URLs;
• analyzing the per equivalence class URL rewrite rule compared to at least one other per equivalence class URL rewrite rule for at least one different equivalence class to determine a trans-equivalence class URL rewrite rule;
• and applying the trans-equivalence class URL rewrite rule to additional web resources from the at least one website to predict that different URLs reference substantially identical web resources, thereby avoiding receipt by the web crawler of substantially identical web resources.

A method for determining a rule applicable to uniform resource locators (URLs), comprising:

• grouping web resources on a web server according to substantially identical content, wherein each group of substantially identical web resources is referred to as an equivalence class;
• analyzing URLs addressing all substantially identical web resources in an equivalence class;
• constructing a per equivalence class URL normalization rule applicable to the URLs corresponding to all substantially identical web resources in the equivalence class;
• analyzing the per equivalence class URL normalization rule compared to at least one other per equivalence class URL normalization rule for at least one different equivalence class to determine a trans-equivalence class URL normalization rule;
• and
• applying the trans-equivalence class URL normalization rule to additional web resources to predict that different URLs reference substantially identical web resources, thereby avoiding a plurality of references to or downloads of substantially identical web resources.