CLIENT-SIDE, SERVER-SIDE AND COLLABORATIVE SPELL CHECK OF URL'S

Spell checking of network addresses such as Uniform Resource Locator (URL) addresses is provided at three levels. Each is invoked when a connection to the specified network address is unable to be established. At a client level, the specified URL is compared with URL's previously successfully used to find candidate misspellings. At a server level, directory and file names are checked against corresponding components of the URL to which connection was requested to return a list of candidate correct spellings to the requestor. Excluded from the list returned to the requestor are the correct spellings of "hidden" files to which general access is not desired. At a network access provider level, information about URL's successfully used by all customers is accumulated and used to provide a candidate list of correct spellings to a user. Older entries are periodically pruned from the database to control size.