Automatic Wrapper Generation for Web Search Engines

To facilitate effective search on the World Wide Web, several 'meta search engines' have been developed which do not search the Web themselves, but use available search engines to find the required information. By means of wrappers, meta search engines retrieve relevant information from the HTML pages returned by search engines. In this paper we present an algorithm to create such wrappers automatically, based on an adaptation of the string edit distance. Our algorithm performs well; it is quick, it can be used for several types of result pages and it requires a minimal amount of interaction with the user.