Webpage menu detection based on DOM

Abstract

One of the key elements of a website are Web menus, which provide fundamental information about the topology of the own website. Menu detection is useful for humans, but also for crawlers and indexers because the menu provides essential information about the structure and contents of a website. For humans, identifying the main menu of a website is a relatively easy task. However, for computer tools identifying the menu is not trivial at all and, in fact, it is still a challenging unsolved problem. In this work, we propose a novel method for automatic Web menu detection that works at the level of DOM.