Abstract: The search engine of the present invention combines the rated index of the content of a web site with the correlation of links to other sites to provide a logical grouping of related sites and enhanced search engine ranking capability. Further, the search engine enhances the results by indicating the closest groupings to the desired topic and iteratively refining the search results. Moreover, the search engine may be utilized to search through any types of data or information having links, pointers or other indicators to other data related in any fashion. For example, the present invention may be utilized to search through data containing documents listing or citing other related documents by specific identification (e.g., case law, patents, various newspaper or other articles, etc.), whereby a search query may result in finding initial documents satisfying the query and other documents related to those initial documents.