2015/08/17 by Tim Weninger, Weninger, Tim, Rodrigo E. Palacios +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Databases (cs.DB) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Surface Chemistry and Catalysis #Web Data Mining and Analysis #Web visibility and informetrics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1508.04066
openalex publication_date 2015/08/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we present a meta-analysis of several Web content extraction algorithms, and make recommendations for the future of content extraction on the Web. First, we find that nearly all Web content extractors do not consider a very large, and growing, portion of modern Web pages. Second, it is well understood that wrapper induction extractors tend to break as the Web changes; heuristic/feature engineering extractors were thought to be immune to a Web site's evolution, but we find that this is not the case: heuristic content extractor performance also tends to degrade over time due to the evolution of Web site forms and practices. We conclude with recommendations for future work that address these and other findings.