Web Searching with Multiple Correct Answers

Abstract

Most web search engines today are geared towards providing a list of relevant websites, along with snippets of text from each website that are relevant to the user's search text. Some of them may also provide specific answers to the user's question. This paper explores techniques for combining many candidate answers into a small set of answers, when it is likely that there is more than one correct answer. We describe and test new algorithms that collect and consolidate candidate answers from many different websites using paired support, reinforcing the ranking factor of those candidate answers that co-occur as pairs across multiple website domains.