A Cooperative Schema between Web Sever and Search Engine for Improving Freshness of Web Repository

Because the web is huge and web pages are updated frequently, the index maintained by a search engine has to refresh web pages periodically. This is extremely resource consuming because the search engine needs to crawl the web and download web pages to refresh its index. Based on present technologies of web refreshing, we present a cooperative schema between web server and search engine for maintaining freshness of web repository. The web server provides meta-data defined through XML standard to describe web sites. Before updating the web page the crawler visits the meta-data files. If the meta-data indicates that the page is not modified, then the crawler will not update it. So this schema can save bandwidth resource. A primitive model based on the schema is implemented. The cost and efficiency of the schema are analyzed.