Error processing methods for providing responsive content to a user when a page load error occurs

• US 7,325,045 B1
• Filed: 08/05/2003
• Issued: 01/29/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 08/05/2003
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: A9.com Incorporated (Amazon.com, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: A9.com Incorporated (Amazon.com, Inc.)
• Inventors: Tesler, Lawrence, Manber, Udi, Bezos, Jeffrey P., Leblang, Jonathan
• Primary Examiner(s): Avellino; Joseph E.
• Application Number:
  US10/634,633
• Time in Patent Office: 1,638 Days
• Field of Search: 709217-219, 709227-229, 714 48- 54, 714/6
• US Class Current: 709/219
• 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]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/40 for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity, e.g. service redundancy protocols, protocol state redundancy or protocol service redirection management of faults, events, alarms or notifications in data switching networks H04L41/06

Abstract

A client component runs on a user computer in conjunction with a web browser and detects errors, such as but not limited to “404: page not found” errors, in which a requested web page or other object cannot be displayed. In response to detecting the error, the client component notifies an error processing server, which uses the URL of the failed request to identify an alternate object to display. The alternate object may, for example, be (a) an object retrieved from replacement URL, or from a URL that is otherwise related to the requested object, (b) a cached version of the requested object, (c) an object retrieved from a closely matching URL found in the user'"'"'s clickstream history, or (d) a dynamically generated page that includes links to one or more of the foregoing types of alternate objects. Also disclosed are methods for identifying alternate objects for a given URL.

Claims

1. A system for handling page request errors, comprising:

an error processing server; and

a client component that runs on a user computing device in association with or as part of a browser program and communicates with the error processing server over a computer network;

wherein the client component is responsive to detection of the unavailability of a target web page requested by the browser program by sending a request to the error processing server, and the error processing server is responsive to the request by using an address of the target web page to select an alternate object to be displayed by the browser program in place of the requested target web page, wherein the error processing server is capable of selecting the alternate object according to a hierarchy of alternate object types such that selection priority is given to a first type of alternate object over at least a second type of alternate object, said hierarchy specified by a user of the user computing device, and specifying selection priorities for at least the following types of alternate objects;

(a) a substitute object which is an object previously determined to have visible content that is substantially identical to visible content of the target web pages (b) a cached version of the target web page, and (c) a non-cached web page that is related to the target web page but is not a substitute object;

whereby the system enables an alternate object that is associated with the requested web page to be presented to the user when the requested web page is unavailable.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the error processing server is capable of checking a plurality of different sources to identify an alternate object, each source corresponding to a different type of alternate object.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the error processing server further causes the browser program to display a message indicating the type of the alternate object selected for display.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the error processing server accesses a table that maps specific URLs to URLs of alternate objects, and uses the table to select at least some of the alternate objects to present to users.

5. The system of claim 4, wherein the table maps URLs to substitute URLs.

6. The system of claim 4, wherein the table maps URLs to related URLs.

7. The system of claim 4, further comprising an analysis component that analyzes clickstreams of users and associated web pages to generate URL-to-URL mappings included within the table.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein the error processing server compares a target URL supplied by a user to URLs contained within a clickstream of the user to evaluate whether the user mis-entered the target URL.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the error processing server additionally generates at least some of the selected alternate objects.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein the client component requests an alternate object from the error processing server in response to detecting at least an HTTP 404 error.

11. The system of claim 1, wherein the client component requests an alternate object from the error processing server in response to detecting at least a timeout error.

12. The system of claim 1, wherein the client component is a browser plug-in.

13. The system of claim 1, wherein the hierarchy additionally specifies a selection priority for the following type of alternate object:

(d) an object obtained from a similarly but differently spelled URL in a clickstream history associated with the browser program.

14. The system of claim 1, wherein the first type of alternate object is a substitute object, and the second type of object is a cached version of the target web page.

15. The system of claim 1, wherein the first type of alternate object is a substitute object and the second type of alternate object is a related web page that is not a substitute object.

16. The system of claim 1, wherein the first type of alternate object is a cached version of the target web page, and the second type of alternate object is a non-cached web page determined to be related to the target web page.

17. The system of claim 1, wherein the error processing server is configured to check for the first type of alternate object, and to return the second type of alternate object only if the first type of alternate object is not available.

18. The system of claim 1, wherein the system enables each user to specify the hierarchy to control how alternate objects are selected for display.

19. The system of claim 1, wherein the system enables an end user to specify that a particular type of alternate object should not be displayed.

20. The system of claim 1, wherein the address of the target web page is a URL.

21. The system of claim 1, wherein the client component is configured to generate HTTP requests.

22. A computer-implemented method of handling page load errors, comprising:

detecting, at a user computing device that runs a web browser, that a browser request for a target web page has resulted in an error of a defined type;

transmitting an address of the target web page from the user computing device to an error processing server;

at the error processing server, using the address of the target web page to select an alternate web page to display within the browser, wherein the error processing server selects the alternate web page using a hierarchy that specifies a preference for a first type of alternate web page over at least a second type of alternate web page, said hierarchy specified by a user of the user computing device, and reflecting relative preferences of the user for at least the following types of alternate web pages;

(a) a substitute web page which is a web page determined to have visible content that is substantially identical to visible content of the target web page, (b) a cached version of the target web page, and (c) a non-cached web page that is related to the target web page but is not a substitute web page; and

causing the web browser to display the alternate web page in place of the requested target web page.

23. The method of claim 22, wherein the hierarchy additionally specifies a relative preference for the following type of alternate web page:

(d) a web page obtained from a similarly but differently spelled URL in a clickstream history associated with the user computing device.

24. The method of claim 22, wherein the method comprises the error processing server selecting a secondary type of alternate web page to display within the browser in response to detecting that a primary type of alternate web page is not available.

25. The method of claim 22, further comprising displaying a message within the web browser indicating which of said types of alternate web pages was selected for display.

26. The method of claim 22, wherein the error of a defined type is an HTTP 404 error.

27. The method of claim 22, wherein the method comprises the error processing server selecting a cached version of the target web page to display in response to determining that no substitute web page is known for the target web page.

28. The method of claim 22, wherein the first type of alternate web page is a web page retrieved from a URL that is deemed to be a replacement URL for the target web page.

29. The method of claim 22, wherein the step of using the address of the target web page to select an alternate web page comprises accessing a URL-to-URL mapping table that separately maps each of a plurality of target URLs to a URL of an alternate web page.

30. The method of claim 22, wherein the step of using the address of the target web page to select an alternate web page comprises comparing a target URL supplied by a user to URLs contained in a clickstream history of the user to evaluate whether the user mis-entered the target URL.

31. The method of claim 22, wherein the alternate web page is generated dynamically by the error processing server.

32. The method of claim 31, wherein the dynamically-generated web page includes links to pages that are at least related to the target web page.

33. The method of claim 22, wherein the hierarchy specifies a type of alternate object that is not to be selected for display by the error processing server.

34. A method of handling errors associated with browser requests for displayable objects, the method comprising:

detecting, at a user computing device that runs a web browser, that a browser request for a target object at a target URL has resulted in an error of a defined type;

looking up an alternate URL based at least in-part on the target URL, said alternate URL specifying a location of an alternate object, said alternate object not being an archived version of the target object, wherein looking up the alternate URL comprises using a hierarchy of alternate object types to select the alternate URL, said hierarchy of alternate object types specifying a preference for a first alternate object type over at least a second alternate object type, wherein the hierarchy is specified by a user of the user computing device, and reflects relative preferences of the user for at least three of the following alternate object types;

(a) a substitute object which is an object determined to have visible content that is substantially identical to visible content of the target object, (b) a cached version of the target object, (c) a non-cached object that is related to the target object but is not a substitute object, (d) an object obtained from a similarly spelled URL present in a clickstream history associated with the user computing device; and

responding to the error by doing at least one of the following (1) retrieving the alternate object from the alternate URL and displaying the alternate object within the web browser, (2) presenting, on the user computing device, a link to the alternate object to allow a user to select the alternate object for display.

35. The method of claim 34, wherein the hierarchy reflects relative preferences of the user for all four of said alternate object types, (a), (b, (c) and (d).

36. The method of claim 34, wherein the method comprises retrieving the alternate object, and displaying the alternate object within the web browser together with a message indicating which of said types of alternate objects is displayed.

37. The method of claim 34, wherein the error of a defined type is an HTTP 404 error.

38. The method of claim 34, wherein the error of a defined type is a timeout error in which a host of the target object fails to respond to the browser request within a selected time period.

39. The method of claim 34, wherein the method comprises determining whether a substitute URL is known for the target URL, and when no substitute URL is known, using a cached version of the target object as the alternate object.

40. The method of claim 34, wherein the method comprises giving preference to a cached version of the target object over a web page that is related to, but not a cached version of, the target object.

41. The method of claim 34, wherein the step of looking up an alternate URL comprises accessing a URL-to-URL mapping table that separately maps each of a plurality of URLs to a URL of a corresponding alternate object.

42. The method of claim 41, wherein the step of accessing the URL-to-URL mapping table comprises accessing a cached version of the table stored on the user computing device.

43. The method of claim 34, wherein the step of looking up an alternate URL is performed by a remote error processing server in response to a message received from the user computing device.

44. The method of claim 34, further comprising receiving an indication of said hierarchy from the user.