A calculate importance system calculates the global importance of a web page based on a “mean hitting time.” Hitting time of a target web page is a measure of the minimum number of transitions needed to land on the target web page. Mean hitting time of a target web page is an average number of such transitions for all possible starting web pages. The calculate importance system calculates a global importance score for a web page based on the reciprocal of a mean hitting time. A search engine may rank web pages of a search result based on a combination of relevance of the web pages to the search request and global importance of the web pages based on a global hitting time.