Extracting the main readable content from a webpage — while filtering out navigation menus, ads, and other boilerplate — is a challenging task.
Basic approaches often fail on complex layouts, and more advanced algorithms are needed.
Early or naive content extractors might simply select the HTML element with the most text or rely on heading tags, but these methods often yield mixed results on real-world sites.
Modern content extraction libraries use heuristic signals to accurately pinpoint the main article in a webpage.