Automatic Generation of an Interest Network and Tag Filter

Computer system and method automatically generate a social interest network. The social interest network indicates or represents (1) respective relevance between system users and taggers, and (2) respective affinity between users and taggers. A tag-based search engine searches and retrieves tagged contents. The search engine also retrieves semantic information associated with the tagged contents and tagger. Semantic information about the searcher-user is compared to the search retrieved semantic information. A comparator determines respective relevance of taggers to the searcher-user and respective affinity of the searcher-user to the taggers. The social interest network results and enables collaboration between users/taggers and filtering of various search results.