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The Pythia proxy for HTTP requests provides three key orthogonal benefits to World Wide Web clients. Guided by statistical models, real-time distillation and refinement enable users to bound latency and exercise explicit control over potentially scarce and costly bandwidth. Transcoding to a representation that the client directly understands may improve rendering on the client or give rise to a representation that can be transmitted more efficiently. A knowledge of client display constraints permit content optimization for rendering on the client.

World Wide Web pages were examined using data collected by the Inktomi Web crawler. More than 2.6 million HTML documents make up the data. The characteristics examined include document size, attributes, number and types of tags, file extensions, ports and protocols, the ration of document size to the number of attributes and tags, and the number of in-links. Certain documents were examined for the number and types of syntax errors and readability scores.