Encore Success Story

Webcrawling

Problem: Encore received an inquiry from a law firm whose client was plaintiff in an intellectual property dispute. The firm’s goal was to show that the defendant was, despite its denials, still selling products that included materials that infringed upon the plaintiff’s patents. The firm needed crawls on 25 different websites, without raising any flags with the defendant’s IT operation.

Solution: Encore immediately got seven machines working on the web crawls. Within 30 days, Encore found numerous instances of questionable products on the defendant’s websites. With this data, the client was prepared to discuss a favorable settlement or continue on the road to trial.

Knowledge: The most difficult part of this project was hitting the deadline while not being detected. Had the defendant noticed, they might have pulled any offending web pages, making it much more difficult to prove infringement. We were able to leverage our knowledge in website analytics to make sure we crawled in a way and at a speed that would be unlikely to cause detection.

Process: With the right tools, web crawling is not overly labor intensive. In this matter, Encore had to properly set up the machines as well as monitoring mechanisms to do the crawl.  Once systems were in place, Encore processed each site on a separate machine. Move to fast and the crawl would be detected. Move to slow and the deadline would be missed.

Technology: In order to get started immediately, Encore purchased seven new work stations to run our proprietary software.  Once all the crawls were complete, data was processed and loaded for delivery to the client, days before the deadline. This gave them plenty of time to do analysis and prepare for next steps in the case.