A method and an apparatus are provided that is capable of displaying existence of update information that is optimal to a client terminal for each piece of individual information when information accumulated in a server is browsed by the client terminal in the Internet or the like. Determination on which piece of the individual information has already been read (seen) information in the terminal is made possible by causing each piece of the information to have individual update information as server side document information and comparing the update information with update information in the client terminal side. By adding and returning a display attribute indicating unread (unseen) to the individual information for each client terminal based on determination results, individual update information that is not unified for each client terminal can be easily grasped.