Patent ID: 7340467

Claim:
A method for maintaining a database of hyperlinks, each hyperlink having a respective source location and a respective destination location; said method comprising: forming respective location identifiers indicative of at least one of said source and destination locations, wherein a location identifier comprises a value indicative of at least one of: a respective location compressed via a hash function; and a numeric value assigned to a respective location; distributing and storing said location identifiers over a plurality of database processors of a distributed database; maintaining said location identifiers so as to provide an indication of a respective hyperlink structure associated with each location identifier by maintaining at least one table in the database for mapping a source location to a respective destination location for each hyperlink of the database of hyperlinks; performing at least one of: for all hyperlinks having a common source location, maintaining a location identifier indicative of said common source location in one of said plurality of database processors; and maintaining location identifiers indicative of all destination locations of said hyperlinks having a common source location in said one of said plurality of database processors; and for all hyperlinks having a common destination location, maintaining a location identifier indicative of said common destination location in one of said plurality of database processors; and maintaining location identifiers indicative of all source locations of said hyperlinks having a common destination location in said one of said plurality of database processors; generating database processor identifiers indicative of a database processor on which a corresponding location identifier is stored; embedding said database processor identifier within each location identifier; and ranking web pages corresponding to said locations.