Click distance determination

A system, comprising:

• a document interface that is arranged to provide access to documents stored on a network;
• an anchor text table that is arranged to store document and link information corresponding to the documents on the network, wherein the anchor text table includes records of target documents and their associated anchor text;
• specialized words that are appended to the anchor text associated with each target document, wherein the specialized word is configured to identify a source document corresponding to each target document;
• an inverted index that is arranged to list words included in anchor text and the target documents associated with each word, such that the specialized words are also listed in the inverted index with the target documents associated with each specialized word;
• and
• a client interface that is arranged to implement a search engine, wherein the search engine determines a click distance associated with each document stored on the network by incrementing a click distance value associated with each document stored on the network when a query to the inverted index for the target documents correspond to the document stored on the network is made.

A computer-readable medium that includes computer-executable instructions for determining click distance, the instructions comprising:

• storing document and link information for documents on a network such that a network graph representing the network is initiated in memory;
• storing each document represented in the network graph in a queue when the document has a click distance value that is different from a first click distance value;
• and
• when the queue is not empty:
• retrieving a document from the queue,
• determining target documents associated with the retrieved document by querying an anchor index, wherein the anchor index includes specialized words that are arranged to associate the documents on the network with their target documents;
• assigning a click distance for each of the target documents associated with the retrieved document, wherein each target document is updated with a new click distance value other than the first click distance value when each target document's click distance is greater than the click distance associated with the removed document plus a variable, and
• adding each of the target documents to the queue that have been updated.