The present invention is directed to a system and a method for generating a temporally ranked set of search results in response to a query. Each result in the set of search results can be ranked temporally or based on the reputation associated with authors of each result and the reputation associated with the repository where each result is located. Temporal ranking takes into account a present importance weight and a future importance weight are assigned to each result. The present importance of each result uses creation date, publication date, in-link dates and search frequency, and the future importance uses an aging factor based on the elapsed time from publication for each search result and a rate at which each search result decreases in importance. Temporal ranking can be applied as a modification of existing and common search engine algorithms include PageRank and HITS.