Patent ID: 8275790

Claim:
A method of accessing a document, comprising: receiving at a document server a request from a client, the request identifying a URL of a document; identifying at the document server a first document copy corresponding to the URL, and determining whether the first document copy is stale; when the first document copy at the document server is determined to be stale, determining at the document server whether a first condition is satisfied using document freshness information stored at the document server; the first condition including a freshness condition with respect to a repository copy of the document in a search engine repository; and when the first document copy at the document server is determined to be stale and the first condition is satisfied, retrieving the repository copy of the document from the search engine repository; and when the first document copy at the document server is determined to be stale, and the first condition is not satisfied, retrieving a host copy of the document; wherein the search engine repository is at a location that is independent of the URL and distinct from the document server; and wherein the search engine repository contains documents, including the repository copy of the document, obtained by a network crawler system.