A computer program product is provided as an abstract update system that improves Internet searching by automatically generating accurate and dynamic search abstracts. The abstract update system enables search engines to provide the most recent abstract information for a document that matches a search query, even if this document may have been crawled after the metadata was indexed. The dynamic abstracts are generated from the latest crawl metadata and link information stored in a link repository. As a result, the dynamic abstracts contain metadata based primarily on changes to a candidate page itself, and changes to what other sources provide about this candidate page. For example, even if a candidate page has not changed, new pages may point to it; some pages that used to point to the candidate page no longer do so; or existing pages that point to the candidate page change their annotations.