Patent ID: 7577671

Claim:
A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving cruise parameters comprising one or more seed uniform resource locator (URL) nodes that each define an origination of a crawl path of a web cruise operation, a cruise depth to be used for the crawl paths, one or more file types to be cruised during the web cruise operation, exclusions to be omitted during the web cruise operation, and a specification of an attribute set to be inherited by each of a plurality of crawl path URL nodes crawled from the one or more seed URL nodes along each crawl path, wherein each of the plurality of crawl path URL nodes along the crawl path has a child relationship to a preceding URL node along the crawl path and a parent relationship to a succeeding URL node along the crawl path; building a cruise tree by crawling a network to retrieve contents and attribute set values from each and every of the crawl path URLs, the contents comprising text documents in one or more formats and document attributes for pages accessed at each crawl path URL node; indexing the contents retrieved from each and every of the plurality of crawl path URLs along each crawl path into a first index and the attribute set values for each and every of the plurality of crawl path URLs along each crawl path into a second index, both indexes being stored in a database; attaching, to each and every child URL node along each crawl path in the cruise tree, the attribute set values for each preceding URL node along the crawl path from one of the one or more seed URL nodes to the preceding node having the parent relationship unless a shorter crawl path from a different seed URL node has already been attached to the child URL node, each child node along each crawl path in the cruise tree inheriting attributes and values from the parent URL from which it was found along the crawl path; receiving instructions to discover the seed URL node for given crawl path URL in the cruise tree; and traversing the cruise tree using the first index and the second index to determine which seed URL leads to the given crawl path URL by a shortest path.