Methods and systems for grouping uniform resource locators based on masks

A method and system for grouping metadata search results associated with media on a computer network, such as multimedia and streaming media include binning and iterative masking. The media metadata has an associated media file, which has an associated uniform resource locator (URL). Each URL has at least one field, and each field has at least one character. Binning includes selecting, sorting, and putting URLs having a common attribute into the same bin. Masking includes creating a mask of masking characters. Each field in each URL in each bin is compare with the mask. If a masking character matches a character in a field, the character in the field is removed from the field. This produces at least one resultant URL, i.e., URL that has been compared with a mask. Identical resultant URLs are collapsing into one URL. Thus, redundant and variant URLs are collapsed into a single URL, which may be provided to a search system (e.g., search engine) and/or to a user.