Index.html Subscriber Publisher A

Web Rendezvous is the meeting of information publisher and subscriber, allowing the subscriber to create and maintain a list of links (indices) to publishers' pages. Rendezvous is diÆcult because pages may move and unauthorized publishers may seek to add their pages to the index (spamming). Current rendezvous approaches are work-intensive or restricted to very limited domains. We provide a taxonomy of web rendezvous methods. We identify automated methods which allow a subscriber to maintain an index of many pages with only a xed amount of e ort. Our methods leverage existing web search engines to be robust to page movement, and use encryption to prevent index spamming. We have designed and implemented two di erent rendezvous methods; we summarize our experience using them, nding that we can securely track index changes in a few days with publisher support, and eventually even without publisher support.