6. The method of claim 5 , wherein obtaining information about the topic further comprises: selecting the subset of the documents from which to extract the excerpts, the subset of the documents being selected based on intrinsic metrics and extrinsic metrics, the intrinsic metrics comprising data from the documents and the extrinsic metrics comprising data relating to the documents but not from the documents; wherein the excerpts are extracted from the subset of documents based on the one or more criteria, the excerpts comprising text and non-text.
7. The method of claim 6 , wherein: the extrinsic metrics comprise one or more of: popularity of Web sites containing the documents, hyperlinks relating to the documents, circulation figures for publications relating to the documents, and length of operation of Web sites containing the documents; wherein the intrinsic metrics comprise presence or absence of one or more of the following in the documents: copyright notices, telephone numbers, shopping carts, misspellings, offensive language, and obscene language; and wherein the criteria comprise one or more of: a discourse topic of the excerpt, grammaticality of the excerpt, a number of sentences comprising the excerpt, and a number of times words relating to the search query are repeated in the excerpt.