Genre Classification of Web Documents

Abstract

Retrieving relevant documents over the Web is an over-whelming task when search engines return thousands of Web documents. Sifting through these documents is time-consuming and sometimes leads to an unsuccess-ful search. One problem is that most search engines rely on matching a query to documents based solely on top-ical keywords. However, many users of search engines have a particular genre in mind for the desired docu-ments. The genre of a document concerns aspects of the document such as the style or readability, presenta-tion layout, and meta-content such as words in the ti-tle or the existence of graphs or photos. By including genre in Web searches, we hypothesize that Web docu-ment retrieval could greatly improve accuracy by better