The OCEANS project has as its goal the improvement of distributed information systems like the World Wide Web based on measurement, analysis, and careful redesign. The project undertook the first published study of the effectiveness of caching in the Web; based on that work members have gone on to study the benefits of eager document dissemination and speculative prefetching. The project's early study of the characteristics of client use of the Web has been widely cited, and recent work has concentrated on statistical characterization of the properties of reference locality in the Web. OCEANS is now beginning a full-scale implementation of a number of our techniques in the context of a experimental high-performance, low-cost distributed Web server.