are also stored in computer memory for later processing the discrete sections of text so far stored in memory are further processed to eliminate sections and subsections determined to dilute the topical content of the document several steps are employed in this processing a of the sections of text stored in memory those predetermined to be irrelevant to the topical content are discarded in the preferred embodiment only the text sections representing the title and body of a document are retained b if the document is an html document the body section is analyzed to identify and eliminate subsections of the body that are predetermined to be irrelevant to the topical content of the document e g navigation elements of the html page there are a variety of methods to this end available to those of ordinary skill in the art in the preferred embodiment the body is broken into subsections according to settings of configurable parameters and comprising one or more sentences or structural elements of the markup e g paragraphs tables etc the subcomponents are analyzed for size based on number of characters and those components whose size falls below a configurable threshold value are discarded c if the original text of the document contained markup e g html sgml xml etc the remaining text stored in memory and the meta data stored in memory is stripped of markup and reduced to a plain text representation the remaining sections of text so processed are considered to contain the topical content of the document and are referred to herein as the topical selections similarly to the above examples an embodiment of the present invention can be configured to analyze and select topical selections from electronic.