An interactive web site summary system builds an overview browsing system for the entire Web. Overview browsing represents an alternative to the search-based view of information work by providing a consistent set of summary views that can be browsed interactively. The views presented by the present system partition and linearize a corpus for ready understanding and exploration. These views show features of a web site such as, for example, the relation of a web site to other web sites, the broad nature of the information contained in the web site, how the web site is structured, how the web site has changed over time. The interactive web site summary system maintains such summary information in a process that is fast enough to be updated daily.