Identifying content that is responsive to a request for an invalid URL

• US 8,438,279 B2
• Filed: 09/15/2012
• Issued: 05/07/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 06/24/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Amazon.com, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Amazon.com, Inc.)
• Inventors: Brundage, Michael L., Williams, Sarah E.
• Primary Examiner(s): Nguyen, Quang N
• Application Number:
  US13/621,126
• Publication Number:
  US 20130066959A1
• Time in Patent Office: 234 Days
• Field of Search: 709/203, 709/217, 709/219, 709/223, 709/224, 709/226, 709/231, 709/246, 715/234
• US Class Current: 709/224
• 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 Another rescue strategy involves determining that the URL contains an obsolete or outdated item identifier (e.g., product identifier) that renders the URL invalid, and returning information regarding one or more related items to the user.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. 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 URL 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, wherein generating the modified URL comprises at least one of the following;

(a) performing URL decoding on the character string two times to repair a doubly URL encoded portion of the character string, and (b) removing malicious content embedded in the URL;

determining whether the modified URL resolves to valid content;

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

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

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the non-URL escape sequence comprises an XML encoded escape sequence.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the XML encoded escape sequence is “

&

amp;

” and

the corresponding escaped character for “

&

amp;

”

is “

&

”

.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein generating the modified URL comprises performing URL decoding on the character string two times.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein generating the modified URL comprises removing malicious content embedded in the URL.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein generating a modified URL further comprises removing “

<

”

or “

>

”

characters in the character string.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein generating a modified URL further comprises replacing a “

+”

character in the URL with a space character.

8. 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 URL 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, wherein generating the modified URL comprises at least one of the following;

(a) performing URL decoding of the URL two times to repair a doubly URL encoded portion of the URL, and (b) removing malicious content embedded in the URL;

determine whether the modified URL resolves to valid content;

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

when the modified URL is determined to not resolve to valid content, identify, using the first product identifier from the URL, substitute content to return in response to the URL request.

9. The system of claim 8, wherein the non-URL escape sequence comprises an XML encoded escape sequence.

10. The system of claim 8, wherein the one or more processors are configured to generate the modified URL at least partly by performing URL decoding of the URL at least two times to repair a doubly URL encoded portion of the URL.

11. The system of claim 8, wherein the one or more processors are configured to generate the modified URL at least partly by removing malicious content embedded in the URL.

12. The system of claim 8, wherein the one or more processors are configured to generate the modified URL in part by:

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

13. The system of claim 12, wherein the non-standard character encoding comprises GBK encoding.

14. The system of claim 12, wherein the URL standard character encoding comprises UTF-8 encoding.

15. A non-transitory computer readable storage system 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, wherein generating the modified character string comprises at least one of the following;

(a) performing URL decoding on the character string two times to repair a doubly URL encoded portion of the character string, and (b) removing malicious content embedded in the URL;

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.

16. The non-transitory computer readable storage system of claim 15, 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.

17. The non-transitory computer readable storage system of claim 15, wherein identifying a substitute URL and providing the substitute URL comprises providing, as the substitute URL, a URL to an error page.

18. The non-transitory computer readable storage system of claim 15, 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.

19. The non-transitory computer readable storage system of claim 15, 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.

20. The non-transitory computer readable storage system of claim 15, wherein generating the modified character string comprises performing URL decoding on the character string two times to repair a doubly URL encoded portion of the character string.

21. The non-transitory computer readable storage system of claim 15, wherein generating the modified character string comprises removing malicious content embedded in the URL.