Yahoo! Inc.

Shivakumar Ganesan

Binu Raj

Bangalore Subbaramaiah Prabhakar

Yarram Sunil Kumar

Shreekanth Karvaje

An automated form filler and script executor is integrated with a web browser engine, which is communicatively coupled to a web crawler, thereby enabling the crawler to identify dynamic web content based on submission of forms completed by the form filler. The crawler is capable of identifying web pages containing forms that require submission, and JavaScript code that requires execution, respectively, for requesting dynamic web content from a server. The form filler systematically completes the form based on various combinations of search parameter values provided by the web page for requesting dynamic content. Duplicate forms are detected, so that the crawler does not unnecessarily re-process forms that are similar to forms that have already been processed. The crawler may also determine which JavaScript links in a page are relevant for execution, so as to avoid unnecessary execution of irrelevant JavaScript links.

Techniques for crawling dynamic web content

An automated form filler and script executor is integrated with a web browser engine, which is communicatively coupled to a web crawler, thereby enabling the crawler to identify dynamic web content based on submission of forms completed by the form filler. The crawler is capable of identifying web pages containing forms that require submission, and JavaScript code that requires execution, respectively, for requesting dynamic web content from a server. The crawler passes a representation of such web pages to the browser engine. The form filler systematically completes the form based on various combinations of search parameter values provided by the web page for requesting dynamic content. Request messages are constructed by the browser engine and passed to the crawler for submission to the server. The dynamic content, received by the crawler from the server in response to the request, can be indexed according to conventional search engine indexing techniques.

Growing community of inventors

Chennai, India

Shivakumar Ganesan