Parallel web crawling is an important technique employed by large-scale search engines for content acquisition. A commonly used inter-processor coordination scheme in parallel crawling systems is the link exchange scheme, where discovered links are communicated between processors. This scheme can attain the coverage and quality level of a serial crawler while avoiding redundant crawling of pages by different processors. The main problem in the exchange scheme is the high inter-processor communication overhead. In this work, we propose a hypergraph model that reduces the communication overhead associated with link exchange operations in parallel web crawling systems by intelligent assignment of sites to processors. Our hypergraph model can correctly capture and minimize the number of network messages exchanged between crawlers. We evaluate the performance of our models on four benchmark datasets. Compared to the traditional hash-based assignment approach, significant performance improvements are observed in reducing the inter-processor communication overhead. © 2012 Springer-Verlag London Limited.