An improved system and method for generating an online summary of a collection of documents is provided. A list of documents may be received, and the titles of the list of documents may be obtained. A set of terms that frequently occur in the titles of the documents may be iteratively expanded and overlapping phrases may be merged until there may be no more terms that occur in the titles with a frequency that exceeds a predefined threshold. In an embodiment, an article summarizer operably coupled to a search engine may be provided to generate a summary of a list of references to web pages in search results using titles of the web pages. The summary of the web pages may then be sent with the list of references to the web pages as search results to a client device for display to a user.