SEARCH ENGINE CLASSIFICATION

Techniques for enabling a search engine to automatically classify the content type of Web documents. In an exemplary embodiment, Web documents may be classified as adult or non-adult, based on whether a document contains adult content. In an aspect, Web documents are mined offline to determine the presence of “adult hubs” to which adult documents are connected. The presence of such adult hubs is a strong indicator that linking Web documents may themselves contain adult content. Computational techniques for quantifying the connection between a candidate document and adult hubs are disclosed. The techniques may be utilized in an Internet search engine platform designed to accept user search queries and deliver highly relevant results.