Stalking the Wild Web Genre (with apologies to Euell Gibbons)

Genre names are useful for referring to communication in the recurring situations in which you find yourselves. Research issues have included the identification of specific Web genre labels and genre classification by automated algorithms. For the last decade or so, academicians have been pursuing the idea with mixed results so far. Is it time to give up the pursuit, or is there still uncharted territory out there to discover? The author can sum up the search for the elusive Web genre in three steps. First, appropriate genre labels and definitions must be determined and validated through user studies to ensure that the terminology is indeed understood by users as indicating familiar genres. Second, it needs to be shown that the genres identified are useful for Web search tasks. Finally, the genres must be predictable by machine algorithms as there are far too many pages on the web for search engine companies to classify by hand.