Is Your RAG Pipeline Eating Garbage HTML? Watch Out for Silent Extraction Failures

Ok_Fox_5823 · reddit · 2026-08-31

The author discovered that many "clean" content extraction tools silently strip real content. For instance, one library deleted main article blocks from MDN and Rust docs because their CSS class names contained "sidebar"—resulting in empty output without errors. This highlights a critical issue: without manually diffing raw HTML against extracted results, RAG systems might lose vital context upstream. What appears to be model "hallucination" could simply be missing data from the scraping/cleaning phase.

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