1. A method for responding to a user query, the method comprising: receiving a query submitted by a user; searching a corpus comprising a plurality of documents to identify one or more hits, wherein each hit is a document from the corpus that is determined to be relevant to the query; accessing a library of annotations created by the user, each annotation being associated with one of the documents in the corpus and including user-specific metadata related to that document; identifying, as an annotated hit, each of the hits that is associated with a matching one of the annotations; generating a search report including a listing of the hits, the search report further indicating, for each hit, whether the hit is an annotated hit; and transmitting the search report to the user.