A region based information retrieval system improves on conventional information retrieval systems by breaking down documents into one or more region(s) and processing the additional information available at a region level of analysis. When looking at regions, it becomes possible to quickly distinguish between groups of related documents, quickly ignore or focus on certain information, track recent evolutions of documents, as well as understand the historical relationships, heritage, and versions of these documents. This is all possible whether or not the document publishers specify where the content originally came from.