A focused random walk system produces samples of on-topic pages from a collection of hyper-linked pages such as Web pages. The focused random walk system utilizes a focused random walk to produce a focused sample, which is a random sample of Web pages focused on a topic. The focused random walk system uniformly samples pages iteratively, where each iteration follows a random link from a union of the in-links and out-links of a page. The system then classifies this randomly selected link to determine whether the page is on-topic. The random walk sampling process could comprise a hard-focus method that selects only on-topic pages at each step of the focused random walk, or a soft-focus method that allows limited divergence to off-topic pages.