Methods and systems for preemptive and predictive page caching for improved site navigation

Abstract

A method for a first computer to request documents from a second computer inacludes steps of sending a first request for a first document to the second computer responsive to a first user action, receiving the first document sent by the second computer responsive to the first request; identifying all references to second documents in the received first document; independently of any user action, automatically sending a second request for at least one of the second documents referred to by the identified references; receiving the second document(s) requested by the second request and storing the received second document(s) in a storage that is local to the first computer, and responsive to a user request for one or more of the second documents, attempting first to service the user request from the local storage and sending a third request to the second computer for second document(s) only when the second document(s) is not stored in the local storage. A method of servicing a request for access to a Web site by a remote computer may include a receiving step to receive the request for access to the Web site; a first sending step to send a first page of the accessed Web site to the remote computer responsive to the request, and independently of any subsequent request for a second page of the Web site originating from the remote computer, preemptively carrying out a second sending step to send the remote computer at least one selected second page based upon a prediction of a subsequent request by the remote computer and/or a history of second pages previously accessed by the remote computer.