A method for providing time discrimination in the World Wide Web. The method includes the steps of creating a computational model of users of the World Wide Web that represents aggregate World Wide Web surfing patterns; using the computational model to determine a first number of clicks that an user goes through in a specific type of query entered by the user in a conventional web search engine; using the computational model to determine a second number of clicks that the user goes through in the specific type of query entered by the user in an optimized web search engine; and subtracting the first number of clicks from the second number of clicks to extract the gain obtained by time discrimination.