Web Content Extraction - a Meta-Analysis of its Past and Thoughts on its Future
This identifies critical limitations in web content extraction tools for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it synthesizes existing knowledge.
The paper conducted a meta-analysis of web content extraction algorithms, finding that most extractors ignore a large portion of modern web pages and that both wrapper induction and heuristic extractors degrade over time due to website evolution.
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.