1. A computer-implemented method for ranking search results, comprising: storing document and link information for documents on a network; generating a representation of the network from the recorded document and link information, wherein the representation of the network includes nodes that represent the documents; computing the click distance for each of the nodes in the representation of the network, wherein the click distance is measured from a first node designated as a highest authority node to second node associated with the computed click distance; and using the computed click distance associated with each of the documents as a query-independent relevance measure in ranking the documents for producing the ranked search results.