Techniques for automatically focusing searches conducted by a search engine are provided. According to one aspect, revised query terms are automatically generated based on text in links that are in incoming (and/or outgoing) link lists associated with documents that are referenced in initial search results generated based on initial query terms. For example, some of the phrases that appear in incoming (and/or outgoing) links associated with a result document may be selected. The selected phrases may be added to the initial query terms to generate revised query terms. These revised query terms may be submitted automatically to the search engine in order to produce a more focused list of revised search results. This process may be performed repeatedly, each iteration revising query terms generated by the previous iteration, until specified criteria are satisfied, at which point the final revised search results may be presented to a user.