The NY Times Magazine “A Year in Ideas 2009” includes a story on Googling Food Webs

Every species — be it earthworm or great white shark — is entwined in a vast and complicated system of predator and prey called a food web. To determine which species in a food web are most important to the survival of the larger ecosystem, scientists design computer programs to model how the extinction of a given species would affect the other species in the system. This year, two scientists announced that they had found an unexpectedly useful tool for this purpose: the seminal Google search algorithm.
Stefano Allesina of the University of Chicago and Mercedes Pascual of the University of Michigan began with a simple hunch.
[…]