Reverse mapping of referral links from storage hierarchy for Web documents

Due to the lack of back-pointers, information about the referral parent(s) of a given Web page is not usually available to Web surfers. This significantly reduces the effectiveness of Web surfing and information discovery. We propose a mechanism to locate the referral parent(s) for a given fragment of a Web document (in terms of an URL address) from the client side. The basic idea is to explore the hierarchical hyperlink structure of a Web document fragment from its storage path directory information that is embedded in its URL. Two mechanisms were proposed: exhaustibility first search (EFS) and generalization first search (GFS). Results showed that through direct mapping of the storage hierarchy path to the URL address and then performing reverse tracing along the hyperlink structure, the chance of discovering a referral parent ranged from 41% to 51%. Compared to EFS, GFS was found to reduce the average search space from 26 pages to 4 pages