Abstract: A distributed collection of web-crawlers to gather information over a large portion of the cyberspace. These crawlers share the overall crawling through a cyberspace partition scheme. They also collaborate with each other through load balancing to maximally utilize the computing resources of each of the crawlers. The invention takes advantage of the hierarchical nature of the cyberspace namespace and uses the syntactic components of the URL structure as the main vehicle for dividing and assigning crawling workload to individual crawler. The partition scheme is completely distributed in which each crawler makes the partitioning decision based on its own crawling status and a globally replicated partition tree data structure.

Abstract: Search of video images in a database is enhanced by specification of at least one object and a background in stored frames and in queries of the database. Video information is stored in the database by means of representative frames that include at least one object and a background. A query of the database is executed by determining whether a representative frame in the database having at least one object and a background is similar to a search image having at least one object and a background.