Patent ID: 8392604

Claim:
A system comprising: a plurality of processors; a content module implemented by at least one of said plurality of processors, the content module comprising information concerning where in a network content can be made available, and a lookup table, said information is cached in a content server on the network, the lookup table comprising a set of alternative user computing devices which have requested at least a subset of the plurality of content and a time at which the content was requested by at least a subset of the set of alternative user computing devices, the set of alternative user computing devices providing information corresponding to user-specified attributes and relating to content different from said information comprised within the content module and cached in the content server, at least a subset of the content available from the content server having associated therewith an expiration period; and a download module implemented by at least one of said plurality of processors for download a browser helper application, the browser helper application capable of receiving a request from a user for content from the content server, wherein based upon analysis of the content server, receiving from the content server at least a subset of the lookup table, parsing the received at least a subset of the lookup table to identify at least one of the plurality of alternative user computing devices having the user-specified attributes from which the requested content is available, the browser helper application being capable of parsing the received at least a subset of the lookup table to remove those alternative content sources having requested the content outside the expiration period, and initiating retrieval of the requested content from the at least one identified alternative user computing devices.