Retrieve a list of the most popular GET param variations for a given URL?

Question

I'm working on building intelligence around link propagation, and because I need to deal with many short URL services where a reverse-lookup from an exact URL address is required, I need to be able to resolve multiple approximate versions of the same URL.

An example would be a URL like http://www.example.com?ref=affil&hl=en&ct=0

Of course, changing GET params in certain circumstances can refer to a completely different page, especially if the GET params in question refer to a profile or content ID.

But a quick parse of the page would quickly determine how similar the pages were to each other. Using a bit of machine learning, it could quickly become clear which GET params don't effect the content of the pages returned for a given site.

I'm assuming a service to send a URL and get a list of very similar URLs could only be offered by the likes of Google or Yahoo (or Twitter), but they don't seem to offer this feature, and I haven't found any other services that do.

If you know of any services that do cluster together groups of almost identical URLs in the aforementioned way, please let me know.

My bounty is a hug.

Answer 1

Every URL is akin an "address" to a location of data on the internet. The "host" part of the URL (in your example, "www.example.com") is a web-server, or a set of web-servers somewhere in the world. If we think of a URL as an "address", then the host could be a "country".

The country itself might keep track of every piece of mail that enters it. Some do, some don't. I'm talking about web-servers! Of course real countries don't make note of every piece of mail you get! :-)

But even if that "country" keeps track of every piece of mail - I really doubt they have any mechanism in place to send that list to you.

As for organizations that might do that harvesting themselves, I think the best bet would be Google, but even there the situation is rather grim. You see, because Google isn't the owner every web-server ("country") in the world, they cannot know of every URL that accesses that web-server.

But they can do the reverse. Since they can index every page they encounter, they can get a pretty good idea of every URL that appears in public HTML pages on the web. Of course, this won't include URLs people send to each other in chats, SMSs, or e-mails. But still, they can get a pretty good idea of what URLs exist.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that what you're looking for doesn't exist, really. The only way you can get all the URLs used to access a single website, is to be owner of that website.

Sorry, mate.

Answer 2

It sounds like you need to create some sort of discrete similarity rank between pages. This could be done by finding the number of similar words between two pages and normalizing the value to a bounded range then mapping certain portions of the range to different similarity ranks.

You would also need to know for each pair that you compare what GET parameters they had in common or how close they were. This information would become the attributes that define each of your instances (stored along side the rank mentioned above). After you have amassed a few hundred pairs of comparisons you could perhaps do some feature subset selection to identify the GET parameters that most identify how similar two pages are.

Of course, this could end up not finding anything useful at all as this dataset is likely to contain a great deal of noise.

If you are interested in this approach you should look into Infogain and feature subset selection in general. This is a link to my professors lecture notes which may come in handy. http://stuff.ttoy.net/cs591o/FSS.html