35. The method of claim 34 wherein identifying the one or more hits includes comparing the query to contents of documents in the corpus.
34. A method for responding to a user query, the method comprising: receiving a query submitted by a querying one of a plurality of users; building a trust network for the querying user, the trust network having as members a subset of the plurality of users including at least one user other than the querying user explicitly identified by the querying user as a friend, wherein the members of the trust network are members of a selected community of users, the selected community being selected by the querying user; providing a trust network interface operable by the plurality of users to identify others of the plurality of users as friends; receiving identifications of friends from a plurality of inputting users, including the querying user, via the trust network interface; storing a list of identified friends for each inputting user; accessing a store of annotations created by the plurality of users, each annotation being associated with a subject one of a plurality of documents belonging to a corpus and with a creating one of the plurality of users, each annotation further including user-specific metadata related to the subject document, wherein the user-specific metadata included in each annotation includes a rating of the subject document; identifying one or more hits, wherein each hit is a document in the corpus that is determined to be relevant to the query and wherein each hit further is the subject document of at least one matching annotation, wherein the creating user of each matching annotation is one of the trust network members, and obtaining an annotation rating from each matching annotation, the annotation rating being a rating of the annotation, and computing an average annotation rating based at least in part on a degree of separation of the creating user in the trust network relative to the querying user; generating a search report including a listing of the hits, wherein the hits in the listing are placed in an order determined based at least in part on the average annotation ratings of the hits; providing in the search report, for a given hit, a control element operable by the querying user to request a display of the user-specific metadata of at least one of the matching annotations; and transmitting the search report and the user-specific metadata of the at least one matching annotation to the querying user.