A system and method are provided for eliciting interesting structure from a collection of entities or resources with explicit and/or implicit, static and/or dynamic relations, called "affinities," between them. Interesting structure includes (1) notions of quality, authority, or definitiveness of information, (2) notions of relevance to a user's information need, (3) notions of similarity among the plurality of resources retrieved from a universe of resources by a query process, and (4) notions of similarity among the usages of resources by different users/servers. Similarities between entities are computed, based on similarities between the affinity values for the entities. That is, where the affinitiy values for two entities resemble each other, the two entities have a high degree of similarity. Using the similarities, the entities are ranked, clustered, etc., based on a significance derived from the similarities. The ranking, clustering, etc., makes up the interesting structure which is sought.