Patent US 8,024,774

The present invention relates to a method for configuring a policy management protocol for a web crawler, the method further comprising the steps of determining a web space that is to be crawled by a web crawler, wherein the web space is comprised of an IP address and/or a range of IP addresses, and determining additional hostnames that are associated with the IP address and/range of IP addresses. The method further comprises the steps of configuring the web crawler to crawl the IP address and/range of IP addresses, and determine additional hostnames that are associated with the IP address or range of IP addresses, and performing a web crawling function upon the determined additional hostnames by the web crawler.