With the growth of the Internet, web-sites are increasingly providing content such as news, articles, and stories. There are an increasing number of sources for content on the Internet. With this growth, content distribution on the Internet has become disorganized. For example, popular news sites carry redundant news items, so users have little need to visit more than one news source. For a user to receive comprehensive news items of a given topic, such as their local area, the user may have to visit numerous sites and materials. At the same time, a user may find it difficult to find a news item about an obscure category, such as a disease or a hobby. In such cases, users often rely on search sites, such as provided by YAHOO! or GOOGLE to locate content items of interest.
There are web-sites that categorize content for users, but in most cases, the categories are fairly broad and non-specific. For example, the typical news site will provide aggregation of news stories under headings such as World News, U.S. News, Sports, Business etc. The aggregation and categorization of such stories is typically done through some manual intervention. A typical situation is that the story is categorized in a general category at its origin, and then distributed for consumption or display on multiple web-sites. Another situation is that editors provide keywords in a story, or associate the keywords with the stories, so that when someone types a search term at a search site that matches the key word, the story will be presented in the search result.
Some sites provide category-specific content by searching for content that matches a particular search term. Such sites typically rely on the use of search terms to ensure that a particular content item is sufficiently pertinent to a particular category. When content is identified, it is known to belong to a category of the search term.