A Rendering-Based Method for Selecting the Main Data Region in Web Pages

Extracting data from web pages is an important task for several applications, such as comparison shopping and data mining. Much of that data is provided by search result pages, in which each result, called search result record, represents a record from a database. One of the most important steps for extracting such records is identifying, among different data regions from a page, one that contains the records to be extracted. An incorrect identification of this region may lead to an incorrect extraction of the search result records. In this paper, we propose a simple but efficient method that generates path expression to select the main data region from a given page, based on the rendering area information of its elements. The generated path expression may be used by wrappers for extracting the search result records and its data units, reducing its complexity and increasing its accuracy. Experimental results using web pages from several domains show that the method is highly effective.