1. A method for responding to a user query, the method comprising: receiving a query submitted by a querying one of a plurality of users; searching a corpus comprising a plurality of documents to identify one or more hits, wherein each hit is a document in the corpus that is determined to be relevant to the query; 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; accessing a store of annotations created by the plurality of users, each annotation being associated with a subject one of the documents in the corpus and with a creating one of the plurality of users, each annotation including user-specific metadata related to the subject document; identifying, as an annotated hit, each of the hits that is the subject document of at least one matching annotation, wherein the creating user of each matching annotation is one of the members of the trust network; generating a search report including a listing of the hits, wherein for each annotated hit, the search report includes information about at least one of the matching annotations; and transmitting the search report to the querying user.