Effective compression for the Web: exploiting document linkages

Providing the infrastructure that supports the World Wide Web is expensive. The costs incurred in running a Web site include those associated with the content being served, those associated with the hardware that supports the site; and the network costs incurred in transmitting that content to the end consumers. In this work we examine mechanisms for compressing Web content so as to reduce the third of these three costs, and describe a scheme that exploits the known connectivities between Web pages to derive improved transmission cost savings compared to the obvious approach of simply compressing each page on the site using a standard tool such as GZIP