COMPUTER METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR COLLECTING PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATION INFORMATION FROM WEB SITES

Computer processing method and apparatus for searching and retrieving Web pages to collect people and organization information are disclosed. A Web site of potential interest is accessed. A subset of Web pages from the accessed site are determined for processing. According to types of contents found on a subject Web page, extraction of people and organization information is enabled. Internal links of a Web site are collected and recorded in a links-to-visit table. To avoid duplicate processing of Web sites, unique identifiers or Web site signatures are utilized. Respective time thresholds (time-outs) for processing a Web site and for processing a Web page are employed. A database is maintained for storing indications of domain URLs, names of respective owners of the URLs as identified from the corresponding Web sites, type of each Web site, processing frequencies, dates of last processings, outcomes of last processings, size of each domain and number of data items found in the last processing of each Web site.