37. The method of claim 36 wherein identifying one or more hits further includes: extracting a search term from the query; and detecting, for each of the annotations in the search pool, whether the search term is present in the user-specific metadata, wherein the associated document is identified as a hit in the event that the search term is present in the user-specific metadata.
39. The method of claim 37 wherein the user-specific metadata includes a plurality of fields and wherein the query specifies which of the fields are to be considered during the act of detecting.