Patent ID: 7877368

Claim:
An apparatus for hosted searching of private local area network (LAN) information comprising; a LAN crawler to automatically and repeatedly crawl a LAN having a plurality of devices, said LAN crawler including, a collection module to attempt to collect, from across each of a plurality of disparate information sources stored in the plurality of devices, only those parts of the disparate information sources that include descriptive information of a first plurality of items of interest, wherein for at least one of the plurality items of interest, the parts include technical information regarding the private LAN, users of the private LAN, and the plurality of devices of the private LAN, and a reporting module to automatically report the collected information organized according to the plurality of items out of a firewall of the private LAN being crawled and over the Internet; and a hosted on-demand search system to be coupled to the Internet including, a set of one or more centralized-search servers including, a crawler interface to receive the reports from the LAN crawler deployed on the private LAN, a database interface to create and synchronize a private search database for the private LAN based on the received reports, wherein the private search database includes the collected information collected from across the disparate information sources of that private LAN organized by the first plurality of items of interest, and wherein the private search database is not organized by documents located on the plurality of devices of the private LAN, a server user interface module to provide a user interface over the Internet to the private LAN, to perform private searches of the private search database, and to provide an application rendered component as part of the user interface, and an application interface to receive a request to access the collected information stored in the private search database from a third-party add-on application, to provide the accessed information to the third-party add-on application, and to receive from the third-party add-on application the application rendered component to be displayed on the user interface; wherein the plurality of disparate information sources include a routing table of a router, a router configuration file of a router, an address resolution protocol (ARP) table of a switch, a bridging table of a switch, a switch configuration table of a switch, a software configuration file of a server, a resource utilization counter of a server, a log file of a server, custom application file of a server, user information of a directory server, group information of a directory server, a software configuration file of a workstation, a registry of a workstation, an operating system interface database of a workstation, a directory of a workstation, a resource utilization counter of a workstation, a log file of a workstation, and a configuration file of a network printer.