Methods and systems for selectively preventing third-party content from being displayed using undefined publisher identifier

What is this patent about?

’170 is related to the field of digital content management and the dynamic modification of electronic documents. Specifically, it addresses the technical challenge of selectively controlling the behavior of third-party content slots within a web page without requiring the manual removal or hard-coding of scripts by the publisher. The background context involves the difficulty publishers face when trying to run experiments or suppress specific advertisements across a large volume of information resources where content slots are already embedded in the source code.

The underlying idea behind ’170 is to intercept and neutralize the execution of content-fetching scripts at the client side by injecting a high-priority code snippet. Rather than deleting the original ad-serving code, the invention uses a pre-emptive execution strategy where a small piece of actionable language is inserted into the document header or an early-loading portion of the body. This snippet effectively hijacks the standard ad-request process by modifying the parameters that the browser would otherwise use to request a third-party content item.

The claims of ’170 focus on a system and method for providing a modified version of an information resource that prevents specific content slots from displaying items based on a multi-factor selection policy. This policy identifies target slots by evaluating the total number of slots on a page, their specific locations, and their physical dimensions. The claims specifically cover the mechanism of replacing a valid publisher client identifier with an undefined identifier, which ensures that when the original ad script eventually runs, the content distribution server ignores the resulting malformed request.

In practice, the invention works by defining a new function or property on the global window object that overrides the standard behavior of common ad-serving libraries. When the browser encounters the original ad script, it attempts to access properties like the client ID or the push function. Because the injected snippet has already redefined these properties using a getter-setter pair, the browser is forced to use the modified, non-functional values. This results in the content slot remaining empty or being removed from the Document Object Model entirely, effectively silencing the slot without breaking the rest of the page logic.

This approach differs from prior solutions that required publishers to manually edit HTML templates or use server-side filters to strip out code. By using actionable language snippets to modify object properties in real-time, the system allows for granular, per-request control. This enables a publisher to serve the original version of a page to one user while serving a modified, ad-suppressed version to another, facilitating seamless A/B testing and user-experience optimization without permanent alterations to the underlying source code.