AIMS: This paper presents a novel local clustering technique, namely, β-hill climbing, to solve the problem of the text document clustering through modeling the β-hill climbing technique for partitioning the similar documents into the same cluster.

METHODS: The β parameter is the primary innovation in β-hill climbing technique. It has been introduced in order to perform a balance between local and global search. Local search methods are successfully applied to solve the problem of the text document clustering such as; k-medoid and kmean techniques.

RESULTS: Experiments were conducted on eight benchmark standard text datasets with different characteristics taken from the Laboratory of Computational Intelligence (LABIC). The results proved that the proposed β-hill climbing achieved better results in comparison with the original hill climbing technique in solving the text clustering problem.