Automatic Extraction of Dynamic Record Sections From Search Engine Result Pages

A search engine returned result page may contain search results that are organized into multiple dynamically generated sections in response to a user query. Furthermore, such a result page often also contains information irrelevant to the query, such as information related to the hosting site of the search engine. In this paper, we present a method to automatically generate wrappers for extracting search result records from all dynamic sections on result pages returned by search engines. This method has the following novel features: (1) it aims to explicitly identify all dynamic sections, including those that are not seen on sample result pages used to generate the wrapper, and (2) it addresses the issue of correctly differentiating sections and records. Experimental results indicate that this method is very promising. Automatic search result record extraction is critical for applications that need to interact with search engines such as automatic construction and maintenance of metasearch engines and deep Web crawling.