A technique for determining the relative relevance of electronic documents based on metadata/content associated with the document as a whole and/or metadata/content associated with one or more subdivisions of the electronic document. Metadata is associated with the document and various subdivision markers in the code of the document. A comparison of electronic documents may be made by comparing the metadata/content associated with the document and/or the subdivisions of the document to determine which documents contains subject matter that is relevant to the subject matter of another document or search criteria. The metadata/content may be weighted and these weights may be modified based on a rank profile. A relevance score may be determined based on the comparison of the metadata/content for the documents and/or subdivisions of the documents as well as the weights attributed to the various subdivisions and documents.