Instead of using a central site including spidering software to recursively search all linked web pages and generate a search index of the Internet, index cards files are created and stored on each web site to provide meta data in the form of conceptual or non-keyword information about the site, such as demographics and categorization information. The meta data is periodically collected and aggregated on a central server. A central catalog of object references is compiled on the central site from the meta data reported from each web site. The information from the index cards is utilized in constructing the central catalog so that more accurate search results may be generated for search queries applied to the catalog, so that the search results may be ranked in meaningful ways, and so that web sites may be more accurately rated.