Patent ID: 8484180

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of selecting a seed for a web crawler, comprising: selecting, from a web graph, a plurality of vertices; wherein the web graph comprises a directed graph with web pages as vertices and links as edges; for each vertex of the plurality of vertices, determining one or more vertex quality metrics, wherein a vertex quality metric measures the ability of a vertex to facilitate discovery of web pages; wherein the one or more vertex quality metrics for a particular vertex is based in part on attributes of one or more vertices to which the particular vertex is connected via one or more edges; based on the vertex quality metrics, determining a first vertex from the plurality of vertices to be a first web crawler starting seed; based on the first web crawler starting seed, initiating a first crawling operation; determining a first set of all to-be-crawled vertices that (a) are within a specified number of hops away from a the first vertex selected as the first web crawler starting seed and therefore (b) are all of the vertices that are expected to be crawled by a the web crawler during the first web crawling operation; and modifying the vertex quality metric of each vertex within the first set of all to-be-crawled vertices; wherein the method is performed by one or more computing devices.