Patent Document ID: 7499965
Application ID: 11068241
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for locating and analyzing a virtual community on the World Wide Web using a software agent for crawling among websites thereon, comprising the steps of: (a) specifying one or more seed sites and parameters for types of websites linked to them to be crawled in order to find a virtual community of websites of interest; (b) crawling at an Intrasite Level, performed by: (i) selecting parameters for seed websites and types of websites to be crawled; (ii) searching for links from seed websites to other linked websites; and (iii) crawling the seed and linked websites for a specified Maximum Number of Pages, Maximum Number of Bytes, or Maximum Levels of Depth, and exiting the Intrasite Level of crawling when one or more of said specified numbers has been reached; then (c) crawling at an Intersite Level, performed by: (i) ranking degrees of centrality between crawled websites according to selected centrality ranking criteria; (ii) searching for keywords on the websites matching selected keyword criteria; and (d) crawling the websites until a Total Number of Sites has been found to qualify by centrality ranking and content matching as websites to be included in a Community, or until a Cutoff Point for Related Ranking has been reached according to the ranking criteria for centrality of websites, then terminating the Intersite Level crawling.