Patent ID: 8135705

Claim:
A method of processing a link embedded in a link document in a client computer, said link comprises a uniform resource locator (URL) reference for a URL document in the client computer or another computer, there being stored a record containing a link reference and an intended fingerprint, said intended fingerprint representing the content of the URL document associated with the URL of the link at the time of or after the link was created, said method comprising: fetching the intended fingerprint for the link; fetching the URL document; creating a current fingerprint of the fetched URL document; comparing the intended fingerprint and the current fingerprint; and identifying that the intended fingerprint and the current fingerprint are different in a material way, wherein there being provided a current fingerprint database having current fingerprints and corresponding URLs; searching the current fingerprint database and locating the current fingerprints that are similar to the intended fingerprint; choosing, subsequent to the searching, a current fingerprint that matches the intended fingerprint within a tolerance to thereby generate a matched current fingerprint; and changing, subsequent to the choosing, the URL of the link in the link document to match the URL of the matched current fingerprint, wherein the matched current fingerprint corresponds to a URL document that is different from a URL document corresponding to the intended fingerprint for the link but is sufficiently similar to the URL document corresponding to the intended fingerprint.