This article examines extraction methods designed to retain the main text content of web pages and discusses how the extraction could be oriented and evaluated: can and should it be as generic as possible to ensure opportunistic corpus construction? The evaluation grounds on a comparative benchmark of open-source tools used on pages in five different languages (Chinese, English, Greek, Polish and Russian), it features several metrics to obtain more fine-grained differentiations. Our experiments highlight the diversity of web page layouts across languages or publishing countries. These discrepancies are reflected by diverging performances so that the right tool has to be chosen accordingly.