Patent ID: 6976070

Claim:
A method of automatic information filtering for identifying inappropriate information among various information provided through Internet and blocking presentation of identified inappropriate information, comprising the steps of: entering an HTML (HyperText Markup Language) information provided through the Internet; judging whether a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of said HTML information entered from the Internet is a top page URL or not, the top page URL being a URL ending with a prescribed character string defining according to a URL hierarchical structure by which each URL is constructed; extracting words appearing in information indicated by the top page URL and carrying out an automatic filtering to judge whether said information indicated by the top page URL is inappropriate or not according to the words extracted from said information indicated by the top page URL, when said URL of said HTML information is the top page URL; registering an upper level URL derived from the top page URL into an inappropriate upper level URL list and blocking presentation of said information indicated by the top page URL, when said information indicated by the top page URL is judged as inappropriate by the automatic filtering, the upper level URL being derived from the top page URL by keeping a character string constituting the top page URL only up to a rightmost slash; comparing said URL of said HTML information with each URL registered in the inappropriate upper level URL list and judging whether there is any matching URL in the inappropriate upper level URL list when said URL of said HTML information is not the top page URL, and blocking presentation of information indicated by said URL of said HTML information when there is a matching URL in the inappropriate upper level URL list, the matching URL being one upper level URL whose character string is contained in said URL of said HTML information; extracting words appearing in said information indicated by said URL of said HTML information, and carrying out the automatic filtering to judge whether said information indicated by said URL of said HTML information is inappropriate or not according to the words extracted from said information indicated by said URL of said HTML information, when there is no matching URL in the inappropriate upper level URL list; and blocking presentation of said information indicated by said URL of said HTML information when said information indicated by said URL of said HTML information is judged as inappropriate by the automatic filtering.