31. The system of claim 23 , wherein weighting of the relevance score between a tag and an object is based on a level of confidence assigned to a user who associated the tag with the object.
23. A system for returning a search results list in response to a search query, the system comprising: a tag database for storing user-entered tags associated with objects, wherein one or more objects is associated with tags as a result of user input and each tag comprises one or more tag terms, each tag term comprising text, and wherein each association of an object with a tag comprises a tag object pair, and each term of a tag comprises a tag term pair; a storage device containing computer-executable instructions comprising a tag analyzer coupled to the tag database, wherein the tag analyzer is programmed to use the associations of tags with objects to compute a relevance score for each of the objects for the search query, wherein the relevance score for a tag object pair is computed by determining a tag term score indicating a degree of relevance between the term and the object, for user-entered strings of one and more terms in a tag, and combining the tag term scores from the term object pairs for each tag term in the tag, wherein a tag term score for an object X and a term A is a function of a combination comprising a total number of different terms in the tag database storing the tags, a total number of tags present in the tag database, a frequency with which the term A is present in the tag database, a number of different terms with which the object X has been tagged, a total number of tags associated with the object X, and a number of different objects that have been tagged with the term A; and a hardware-implemented search engine for receiving the search query and for presenting the results list in response to the search query, the results list comprising references to one or more of the objects, wherein the order of the multiple objects in the results list is influenced by the relevance scores.