System, device and method for using user-generated metadata to arrive at a modified search index that emphasizes a relationship between documents selected by a user during a prior search session and salient terms of those documents. An initial search index is modified by adding a synthetic term and a synthetic document to terms and documents that are used to arrive at the elements of the index and by modifying the relevance scores to highlight one or more of the search terms, the synthetic term, and the synthetic document. Synthetic term ties a cluster of related documents together and synthetic document ties terms of these documents together. Synthetic term is not found in any other documents and synthetic document does not belong to any normal corpus of documents. Modified index aids in re-generating prior user choices because it contains artifacts reflecting associations that user perceived between various terms and documents.