1. A computerized method for responding to a user query, the method comprising: receiving a query submitted by a user; electronically searching, via a processing device, 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; generating a search report including a listing of the one or more hits; transmitting the search report to the user, wherein for each hit that is not an annotated hit, providing a control element selectable by the user to create a new annotation associated with the hit; receiving one or more annotations related to the one or more hits from the user, wherein the one or more annotations include one or more user-entered keywords describing the one or more hits; generating one or more annotation abstracts for the one or more hits based on the one or more annotations, the one or more annotation abstracts comprising one or more portions of a document associated with the one or more hits, the portions of the document relevant to the one or more user-generated keywords describing the one or more hits; adding to a data store the one or more annotations relating to the one or more hits provided by the user in order to create a library of annotations; electronically accessing, via the processing device, the library of annotations created by the user, each annotation being associated with at least one of the documents in the corpus and including user-specific metadata related to that document; classifying the one or more hits according to the one or more annotations; identifying one or more interests of the user based on the classification of the hits related to the one or more annotations; determining an intended scope of the query submitted by the user based on the one or more interests, the intended scope comprising a classification of hits from a plurality of disparate classifications of hits; detecting whether a search term associated with the query is present for each document in the corpus associated with the one or more annotations, wherein a given document is identified as a hit in the event that the search term is present in the document and the document is associated with the intended scope of the query, wherein the user-specific metadata includes a plurality of fields and the query specifies which of the fields are to be considered during an act of identifying documents and which of the fields are to be excluded during the act of identifying documents; electronically identifying, via the processing device, as an annotated hit, each of the hits that is associated with a matching one of the annotations in the fields being considered and associated with the intended scope of the query; determining an inferred rating for each hit that is not an annotated hit on the basis of similarity of a hit that is not an annotated hit with one or more annotated hits and a rating of the one or more annotated hits; in response to receiving the one or more annotations, automatically regenerating the search report to update the search report, the search report comprising: the listing of the hits ranked accordingly to the inferred rating of the hits that are not annotated hits and the rating of the annotated hits, and the one or more annotation abstracts, the search report further indicating, for each hit, whether the hit is an annotated hit; and transmitting the regenerated search report to the user.
4. The method of claim 1 wherein generating the search report further includes: for each annotated hit, providing in the search report a control element operable by the user to request a display of the user-specific metadata of the matching annotation.