Patent ID: 8700766

Claim:
A method of indirectly classifying a user computer, comprising: receiving at a server computer system a plurality of web request events corresponding to web requests issued by users, wherein each respective web request event of the plurality of web request events includes: i) a cookie that identifies a user computer that originated the corresponding respective web request; ii) an IP address corresponding to the user computer at the time the corresponding respective web request was issued; and iii) a date/time stamp indicating when the corresponding respective web request was received at a web server; storing the plurality of web request events; selecting a subset of the plurality of web request events, wherein each web request event in the subset is associated with a single first cookie; for each respective selected web request event in the subset: computing a respective geographical location corresponding to the user computer using the IP address associated with the respective selected web request event; and determining a local time and local day of week corresponding to the respective selected web request event using a stored date/time stamp of the corresponding respective web request and the computed respective geographic location; and classifying the user computer as a type including home computer, work computer, or mobile computer, wherein the classification is based, at least in part, on a usage pattern of the user computer, and wherein the usage pattern includes the local time and local day of week data corresponding to the web request events in the subset.