Patent ID: 7805426

Claim:
A method for defining a web crawl space to be crawled, comprising: at a computer including a processor: receiving a seed list including one or more seed names from a user, wherein each seed name represents a website with a two part name or a three part name, wherein the last part of the seed name is a top level domain name; and in response to receiving the seed list, generating a web crawl space for the received seed list by generating one or more new allow rules that determine what part of a webspace is to be crawled by: for each of the one or more seed names, generating a new allow rule by appending a slash and a wildcard character at an end of the seed name to allow crawling of content of the website; determining whether the seed name has less than three parts or at least three parts; in response to determining that the seed name has less than three parts, updating the allow rule for the seed name by appending a wildcard character and a dot before a beginning of the seed name to allow crawling of content of one or more subdomains; and in response to determining that the seed name has at least three parts, updating the allow rule for the seed name by replacing a first portion of the seed name before a dot with a wildcard character.