As the Web continues to grow, it has become increasingly difficult to search for relevant information using traditional search engines. Topic-specific search engines provide an alternative way to support efficient information retrieval on the Web by providing more precise and customized searching in various domains. However, developers of topic-specific search engines need to address two issues: how to locate relevant documents (URLs) on the Web and how to filter out irrelevant documents from a set of documents collected from the Web. This paper reports our research in addressing the second issue. We propose a machine-learning-based approach that combines Web content analysis and Web structure analysis. We represent each Web page by a set of content-based and link-based features, which can be used as the input for various machine learning algorithms. The proposed approach was implemented using both a feedforward/backpropagation neural network and a support vector machine. Two experime...