A comparison of techniques to find mirrored hosts on the WWW

We compare several algorithms for identifying mirrored hosts on the World Wide Web. The algorithms operate on the basis of URL strings and linkage data: the type of information about Web pages easily available from Web proxies and crawlers. Identification of mirrored hosts can improve Web‐based information retrieval in several ways: first, by identifying mirrored hosts, search engines can avoid storing and returning duplicate documents. Second, several new information retrieval techniques for the Web make inferences based on the explicit links among hypertext documents—mirroring perturbs their graph model and degrades performance. Third, mirroring information can be used to redirect users to alternate mirror sites to compensate for various failures, and can thus improve the performance of Web browsers and proxies. We evaluated four classes of “top‐down” algorithms for detecting mirrored host pairs (that is, algorithms that are based on page attributes such as URL, IP address, and hyperlinks between pages, and not on the page content) on a collection of 140 million URLs (on 230,000 hosts) and their associated connectivity information. Our best approach is one which combines five algorithms and achieved a precision of 0.57 for a recall of 0.86 considering 100,000 ranked host pairs.