. . .

An alternative to the all-inclusive method used by the likes of AltaVista
is being developed by Jon Kleinberg at Cornell University. Instead of looking
for keywords in the text of Web pages, Kleinberg ranks relevance by looking at
the number of links to a page from other sites. He reasons that the more useful
a page is, the more links will point to it. No search engine has been built
around his ideas, but several papers about his work can be found at
http://simon.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/.