The popularity of web pages is monitored and used to rank the web pages retrieved in response to an Internet search. The popularity of a web page is proportionate to the number of visits to that web page. Web pages with greater popularity are ranked higher in priority. Furthermore, the score of a first web page is propagated to a plurality of second web pages to which the first web page is linked substantially in relative proportion to the popularity of the links from the first web page to each of the second web pages. Monitoring devices monitor TCP packets traversing the Internet and extract information from the TCP packets, such as the requested URI or URL, the client IP address, a server IP address and a server host name, and a referrer URI, if any. The extracted information is forwarded to a processing module that keeps track of the popularity of the web pages.