PREFETCHING AND CACHING DOCUMENTS ACCORDING TO PROBABILITYRANKED NEEDS LIST

A method is presented for determining whether to prefetch and cache documents on a computer. In one embodiment, documents are prefetched and cached on a client computer from servers located on the Internet in accordance with their computed need probability. Those document with a higher need probability are prefetched and cached before documents with lower need probabilities. The need probability for a document is computed using both a document context factor and a document history factor. The context factor of the need probability of a document is determined by computing the correlation between words in the document and a context Q of the operating environment. The history factor of the need probability of a document is determined by integrating both the recency of document use and the frequency of document use.