URL RESCUE BY CORRECTION OF ENCODING ERRORS

• US 20130066959A1
• Filed: 09/15/2012
• Published: 03/14/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 06/24/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Michael L. Brundage, Sarah E. Williams
• Original Assignee: Michael L. Brundage, Sarah E. Williams
• Inventors: Brundage, Michael L., Williams, Sarah E.
• Granted Patent: US 8,438,279 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/203
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0709 in a distributed system consisting of a plurality of standalone computer nodes, e.g. clusters, client-server systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0793 Remedial or corrective actions recovery from an exception in an instruction pipeline G06F9/3861; by retry G06F11/1402; for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity H04L69/40
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9566 URL specific, e.g. using aliases, detecting broken or misspelled links
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/02 based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]

Abstract

A server system provides responsive content to a user when a request for an invalid URL is received. The server system may implement multiple rescue strategies for attempting to rescue the invalid URL. One such rescue strategy involves repairing the URL by correcting for encoding errors. Another rescue strategy involves determining that the URL contains an obsolete or outdated item identifier (e.g., product identifier) that renders the URL invalid, and returning information regarding one or more related items to the user. Another rescue strategy involves mining the invalid URL for one or more text strings reflective of the type of content desired, and then using the one or more text strings to execute a keyword search to identify content to provide to the user. The various rescue strategies may be attempted in sequence according to a hierarchy.

Claims

1. (canceled)

2. A computer-implemented method for repairing Uniform Resource Locator (URL) request messages, the method comprising:

receiving, on a computing system, a URL request from a user computing device, the URL request specifying a URL that includes a name of a domain followed by a character string;

determining whether the character string references a valid location;

in response to determining that the character string references an invalid location, generating a modified character string at least partly by replacing a non-URL escape sequence in the character string with a corresponding special character associated with the non-URL escape sequence;

determining whether the modified character string resolves to valid content;

when the modified character string is determined to resolve to valid content, providing the valid content associated with the modified character string to the user computing device; and

when the modified character string is determined to not resolve to valid content, providing content associated with a substitute URL to the user computing device.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the non-URL escape sequence comprises an XML encoded escape sequence.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the XML encoded escape sequence is “

&

amp;

” and

the corresponding escaped character for “

&

amp;

”

is “

&

”

.

5. The method of claim 2, wherein generating a modified character string further comprises performing URL decoding on the character string at least two times to repair doubly URL encoded portions of the character string.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein performing URL decoding on the character string comprises replacing one or more URL escape sequences in the character string with a corresponding special character.

7. The method of claim 2, wherein generating a modified character string further comprises removing “

<

”

or “

>

”

characters in the character string.

8. The method of claim 2, wherein generating a modified character string further comprises replacing “

+”

characters in the character string with a space character.

9. The method of claim 2, wherein generating a modified character string further comprises removing malicious content embedded into the character string as part of a URL attack.

10. A system for repairing Uniform Resource Locator (URL) request messages, the system comprising:

computer memory that stores a mapping of escape sequences to special characters; and

one more processors configured to;

obtain a URL request from a user computing device, the URL request specifying a URL that includes a name of a domain followed by a character string, the character string including a first product identifier;

in response to determining that the character string references an invalid location, generate a modified character string at least partly by converting one or more non-URL escape sequences in the character string into URL format based in part on the mapping stored in the computer memory;

determining whether the modified character string resolves to valid content;

when the modified character string is determined to resolve to valid content, provide the valid content associated with the modified character string; and

when the modified character string is determined to not resolve to valid content, identify, using the first product identifier from the URL, a substitute URL and provide content associated with the substitute URL.

11. The system of claim 10, wherein the non-URL escape sequence comprises an XML encoded escape sequence.

12. The system of claim 10, wherein the one or more processors are configured to generate a modified character string by performing URL decoding on the character string at least two times to repair doubly URL encoded portions of the character string.

13. The system of claim 10, wherein the non-URL escape sequence begins with an escape character followed immediately by one or more sequence characters.

14. The system of claim 10, wherein the one or more processors are configured to generate a modified character string by:

in response to determining that the invalid URL is encoded in a non-standard character encoding, converting the URL from the non-standard character encoding to a URL standard encoding.

15. The system of claim 14, wherein the non-standard character encoding comprises GBK encoding.

16. The system of claim 14, wherein the URL standard character encoding comprises UTF-8 encoding.

17. Non-transitory computer readable storage having stored thereon instructions that, when executed, direct a computing system to perform operations comprising:

obtaining a URL request from a user computing device, the URL request specifying a URL that includes a name of a domain followed by a character string;

determining whether the character string references an invalid location;

in response to determining that the character string references an invalid location, generating a modified character string at least partly by replacing a non-URL escape sequence in the character string with a corresponding special character associated with the non-URL escape sequence and performing URL decoding on the character string at least two times to repair doubly URL encoded portions of the character string;

determining whether the modified character string resolves to valid content;

when the modified character string is determined to resolve to valid content, providing a modified URL including the name of the domain and the modified character string; and

when the modified character string is determined to not resolve to valid content, identifying a substitute URL and providing the substitute URL.

18. The non-transitory computer readable storage of claim 17, wherein identifying a substitute URL and providing the substitute URL comprises:

extracting search terms from the URL;

executing a keyword search using the extracted search terms; and

providing, as the substitute URL, a URL to a result page of the keyword search.

19. The physical computer storage of claim 17, wherein identifying a substitute URL, and providing the substitute URL comprises providing, as the substitute URL, a URL to an error page.

20. The non-transitory computer readable storage of claim 17, wherein providing the substitute URL comprises providing the substitute URL to a web server in communication with the user computing device, the web server configured to serve content associated with the substitute URL to the user computing device.

21. The non-transitory computer readable storage of claim 17, wherein providing the valid content associated with the modified character string comprises providing the content associated with the substitute URL to a web server in communication with the user computing device, the web server configured to serve the content to the user computing device.