Patent ID: 8892680

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request from a user device for a content element, the HTTP request being generated from a dynamic Uniform Resource Locator (URL), wherein the HTTP request indicates a GET method for retrieving the requested content; generating a static content element identifier from the HTTP request by removing dynamic parameters from the HTTP request; determining whether the content element is in a cache using the static content element identifier, wherein the cache is remote from the client device; modifying the HTTP request from indicating the GET method to indicating a HEAD method in response to determining that the content element is in the cache; sending the HTTP request indicating the HEAD method to a content provider at a host address given in the URL for the content provider to determine whether the content element can be served to the user device from the cache; and receiving a HTTP response from the content provider, the HTTP response comprising a header, the header indicating whether the user device has access privileges to the content element.