To accurately classify a query as navigational, thousands of available features are explored, extracted from major commercial search engine results, user Web search click data, query log, and the whole Web's relational content. To obtain the most useful features for navigational query identification, a three level system is used which integrates feature generation, feature integration, and feature selection in a pipeline. Because feature selection plays a key role in classification methodologies, the best feature selection method is coupled with the best classification approach to achieve the best performance for identifying navigational queries. According to one embodiment, linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to rank features and the top ranked features are fed into a Stochastic Gradient Boosting Tree (SGBT) classification method for identifying whether or not a particular query is a navigational query.