SEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE REPRESENTING HOSTING CLIENT DEVICES

• US 20140324815A1
• Filed: 05/24/2013
• Published: 10/30/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 04/29/2013
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Avago Technologies General IP PTE Limited (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Broadcom Corporation (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Inventors: Diab, Wael William, Rajakarunanayake, Yasantha Nirmal, Bennett, James Duane
• Application Number:
  US13/902,467
• Publication Number:
  US 20140324815A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/709
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques

Abstract

A system and method for supporting searching of client device hosted content. A search infrastructure supports creation, managing and searching of client device hosted content. A client device, which hosts content, communicates its client device identification (ID), type and access restrictions to the search infrastructure. In addition, the client device communicates a global network route to the client device content as a pointer for the search engine to provide a search requestor access to both the client device and specified content. Client device information is also provided to a client device registry accessible by the search infrastructure, for example a registry maintained in a cloud based service. Client devices can enter into client device services agreement with a third party storage system for the purposes of providing a higher probability that their client device hosted content will be available.

Claims

1. A system supporting searching of content hosted by client devices comprising:

a crawler to access and index the content hosted by the client devices, the crawler comprising;

one or more downloader modules to crawl and parse the content hosted by the client devices;

a scheduler module to schedule the crawling and parsing steps;

a link module to provide links to the one or more downloader modules; and

a download processor module to index the crawled and parsed content hosted by the client devices to produce indexed data;

a database structure to store the indexed data; and

one or more search engines to search the database structure and provide search results including at least one instance of the content hosted by the client devices to a search requestor device.

2. The system of claim 1, further comprising a client device registry accessible by the system, the client device registry comprising one or more of:

client device identification, client device global network route, client device type and client device status.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein the client device registry is maintained by a cloud based service.

4. The system of claim 1, further comprising a preprocessor to preprocess content hosted by the client devices.

5. The system of claim 1, further comprising a cache memory for temporarily storing at least part of the content hosted by the client devices.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the client devices are mobile client devices with communications capabilities.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein the crawler module further comprises both a client device crawling module and web crawler module to access and index both the content hosted by the client devices and world-wide-web content.

8. A method performed by a client device, the method comprising:

communicating client device identification to a search system infrastructure;

communicating a global network route to access content hosted by the client device to the search system infrastructure;

communicating client device access restrictions to the search system infrastructure; and

providing access to the content hosted by the client device to the search system infrastructure using the communicated client device identification, global network route and client device access restrictions.

9. The method of claim 8, further comprising communicating client device type to the search system infrastructure.

10. The method of claim 8, further comprising the client device access restrictions comprising one or more of:

login ID, password, public, and private security keys.

11. The method of claim 8, further comprising storing one or more of:

the client device identification, the global network route, client device type, and client device status in a client device registry accessible by the search system infrastructure.

12. The method of claim 8, further comprising the client device preprocessing the content hosted by the client device.

13. The method of claim 8, further comprising securing third party storage space for storing the content hosted by the client device.

14. The method of claim 13, further comprising the secured third party storage space providing one or more of:

higher probability of access to the content hosted by the client device, large scale access, backup of the content hosted by the client device, and a vehicle for collecting royalties or payments.

15. A method performed by a search system to access content hosted by a client device, the method comprising:

obtaining client device identification;

obtaining a global network route to the identified client device;

obtaining access restrictions of the identified client device;

accessing content hosted by the identified client device using the communicated client device identification, global network route and client device access restrictions;

indexing accessed content; and

storing the indexed accessed content in a search database accessible to one or more search engines.

16. The method of claim 15, further comprising obtaining client device type.

17. The method of claim 15, further comprising obtaining one or more of the:

the client device identification, the global network route, client type, and client status from a client device registry accessible by the search system.

18. The method of claim 17, wherein the client device registry is maintained by a cloud based service.

19. The method of claim 15, further comprising preprocessing the accessed content.

20. The method of claim 15, further comprising recognizing a storage system storing one or more parts of the content hosted by the identified client device remotely from the identified client device.