13. A computer-readable medium having stored thereon computer-executable instructions which when executed by a computer perform a method, comprising: receiving resource items generated by a search engine in response to a search request, the resource items including one or more content portions and one or more metadata portions; parsing each of the resource items into the one or more content portions and associated formatting information applied to the one or more content portions; passing the one or more content portions and associated formatting information for each of the resource items through a feature extraction application; determining applicability of the one or more metadata portions by comparing the one or more metadata portions against known metadata for use in ranking search results; comparing words parsed from the content portions that is separate from the one or more metadata portions against a database of known words that have been previously characterized; using formatting characteristics to determine when to extract a title from the resource item; wherein the formatting characteristics that are used include: a bold formatting characteristic; an underlining formatting characteristic; wherein the feature extraction application stores statistical information for each extracted title that provides a number of and a frequency of appearance of the extracted title in the data; and extracts features from the one or more content portions and associated formatting information for each of the resource items; passing the extracted features and the one or more content portions and associated formatting information through a ranking application for generating a ranking value for each of the resource items based on a relevance of each of the resource items to the search request received by the search engine; and generating a list of the resource items in an order according to the ranking value for each of the resource items.
14. The computer-readable medium of claim 13 , wherein parsing each of the resource items further comprises: parsing the one or more metadata sources in each of the resource items for one or more metadata items; and parsing the one or more content portions into one or more text selections and associated formatting information applied to the one or more text selections.