Folksonomies, collaboratively created sets of metadata, are becoming more and more important for organising information and knowledge of communites in the Web. While for a single user the difference to keyword assignment is marginal, the power of folksonomies emerges from the collaborative aspects. Folksonomies are already issue of research. Within this publication we analyse underlying statistical properties of broad folksonomies aiming to identify laws and characteristics, which allow inferring properties for folksonomy based retrieval. The actual benefit of folksonomies for retrieval and the derived methods are concluded from experiments with aggregated data from del.icio.us.