Efficient web change monitoring with page digest

  • Authors:
  • David Buttler;Daniel Rocco;Ling Liu

  • Affiliations:
  • Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th international World Wide Web conference on Alternate track papers & posters
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled a publishing explosion of useful online information, which has produced the unfortunate side effect of information overload: it is increasingly difficult for individuals to keep abreast of fresh information. In this paper we describe an approach for building a system for efficiently monitoring changes to Web documents. This paper has three main contributions. First, we present a coherent framework that captures different characteristics of Web documents. The system uses the Page Digest encoding to provide a comprehensive monitoring system for content, structure, and other interesting properties of Web documents. Second, the Page Digest encoding enables improved performance for individual page monitors through mechanisms such as short-circuit evaluation, linear time algorithms for document and structure similarity, and data size reduction. Finally, we develop a collection of sentinel grouping techniques based on the Page Digest encoding to reduce redundant processing in large-scale monitoring systems by grouping similar monitoring requests together. We examine how effective these techniques are over a wide range of parameters and have seen an order of magnitude speed up over existing Web-based information monitoring systems.