1. A computerized method for ranking a set of documents, the set of documents including links connecting the documents to each other, comprising the step of: constructing a graph in a memory, the graph including nodes and directed edges, each node representing one of the documents, and the directed edges representing the links connecting the documents; selecting a first subset of the documents from the set of documents to form a topic; assigning a relevance weight to each node, the relevance weight of each node based on the similarity of the document represented by the node to the topic; selecting a second subset of the documents from the set of documents to test for relevance to the topic; pruning a particular node from the second subset if the associated relevance weight of the particular node is less than a predetermined threshold to form a pruned graph representing a third subset of the documents; and ranking the subset of documents represented by the nodes of the pruned graph according to a connectivity based ranking scheme.