2. The system of claim 1 wherein generating a representation of the network further comprises generating a network graph and storing the network graph into the memory.
1. A system for ranking search results, comprising a search engine on a computing device, the search engine configured to execute computer-executable instructions, which when executed by the computing system cause the computing system to perform a method comprising: discovering a plurality of documents on a network; recording document and link information for each of the plurality of documents on the network; generating a representation of the network from the document and link information, wherein the representation of the network includes a plurality of nodes, each document being represented by one of the plurality of nodes; receiving manually input click distances designating a subset of the plurality of nodes as highest authority nodes, the subset of the plurality of nodes including at least a first highest authority node and a second highest authority node, wherein the manually input click distances indicate a relative importance of each highest authority node with respect to other highest authority nodes; initializing click distances for a second subset of the plurality of nodes to a maximum value, the second subset of the plurality of nodes not including highest authority nodes and comprising at least a first non-highest authority node and a second non-highest authority node; computing click distances for the first and second non-highest authority nodes by: determining a first click distance for the first non-highest authority node, the first click distance being a first number of branches traversed on a first shortest path between the first non-highest authority node and the first highest authority node; determining a second click distance for the first non-highest authority node, the second click distance being a second number of branches traversed on a second shortest path between the first non-highest authority node and the second highest authority node; determining a third click distance for the second non-highest authority node, the third click distance being a third number of branches traversed on a third shortest path between the second non-highest authority node and the first highest authority node; and determining a fourth click distance for the second non-highest authority node, the fourth click distance being a fourth number of branches traversed on a fourth shortest path between the second non-highest authority node and the second highest authority node; storing the first, second, third, and fourth click distances in memory, such that the first and second click distances are associated with a first document, and the third and fourth click distances are associated with a second document; calculating search rank results using at least one of the first, second, third, and fourth click distances associated with each of the first and second documents as a query-independent relevance measure in ranking the plurality of documents; and storing search rank results in memory, wherein the search rank results comprise a list of documents arranged in a descending order of relevance.