3. The method of claim 1 , where a refers to a probability that a user, when accessing a particular document of the one or more second documents, will randomly access another particular document, of the plurality of documents, rather than following the link to the first document, the particular document being different from the other particular document.
1. A method performed by a computer, the method comprising: selecting, by the computer, a first document from a plurality of documents stored in a database; generating, by the computer, a rank for the first document using: R = α N + ( 1 - α ) ⁢ ( r ⁡ ( B 1 )  B 1  + … + r ⁡ ( B n )  B n  ) , where R refers to the rank for the first document, n refers to a value greater than or equal to one, B 1 , . . . , B n refer to one or more second documents, of the plurality of documents, that include a link that points to the first document, r(B 1 ), . . . , r(B n ) refer to ranks for the one or more second documents, |B 1 |, . . . , |B n | refer to a quantity of links that the one or more second documents include, α refers to a constant that is greater than zero and less than one, and N refers to a total quantity of the plurality of documents; and storing, by the computer, the rank for the first document.