A search engine identifies a list of documents from a set of documents in a database in response to a set of query terms. For each document in the list, the search engine determines an information retrieval score based on its content and the query terms, and also identifies a set of source documents that have links to the document and that also have anchor text satisfying a predefined requirement with respect to the query terms. The search engine calculates a personalized page importance score for each of the identified source documents according to a set of user-specific parameters and accumulates the personalized page importance scores to produce a personalized anchor text score for the document. The personalized anchor text score is then combined with the document's information retrieval score to generate a personalized ranking for the document. The documents are ordered according to their respective personalized rankings.