A Fast Template-based Approach to Automatically Identify Primary Text Content of a Web Page

Abstract: Search engines have become an indispensable tool for browsing information on the Internet. The user, however, is often annoyed by redundant results from irrelevant Web pages. One reason is because search engines also look at non-informative blocks of Web pages such as advertisement, navigation links, etc. In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm called FastContentExtractor to automatically detect main content blocks in a Web page by improving the ContentExtractor algorithm. By automatically identifying and storing templates representing the structure of content blocks in a website, content blocks of a new Web page from the Website can be extracted quickly. The hierarchical order of the output blocks is also maintained which guarantees that the extracted content blocks are in the same order as the original ones.