16. The computer-readable medium of claim 15 , whereby passing the extracted features and the one or more content portions and associated formatting information and one or more metadata portions through the ranking application for generating the ranking value for each of the resource items based on a relevance of each of the resource items to a search request received by the search engine includes passing the statistical information for the extracted features through the ranking application with the associated extracted features.
15. The computer-readable medium of claim 14 , whereby extracting features from the one or more content portions and associated formatting information and the one or more metadata portions includes extracting statistical information for any extracted features including a frequency with which any features are found in an associated resource item.