This article presents P4Q, a fully decentralized gossip-based protocol to personalize query processing in social tagging systems. P4Q dynamically associates each user with social acquaintances sharing similar tagging behaviors. Queries are gossiped among such acquaintances, computed on-the-fly in a collaborative, yet partitioned manner, and results are iteratively refined and returned to the querier. Analytical and experimental evaluations convey the scalability of P4Q for top-k query processing, as well its inherent ability to cope with users updating profiles and departing.