Corroborating Answers from Multiple Web Sources

The Internet has changed the way people look for informa- tion. Users now expect the answers to their questions to be available through a simple web search. Web search en- gines are increasingly efficient at identifying the best sources for any given keyword query, and are often able to identify the answer within the sources. Unfortunately, many web sources are not trustworthy, because of erroneous, mislead- ing, biased, or outdated information. In many cases, users are not satisfied with —or do not trust— the results from any single source and prefer checking several sources for cor- roborating evidence. In this paper, we propose methods to aggregate query results from different sources in order to save users the hassle of individually checking query-related web sites to corroborate answers. To return the best ag- gregated answers to the users, our techniques consider the number, importance, and similarity of the web sources re- porting each answer, as well as the importance of the answer within the source. We present an experimental evaluation of our technique on real web queries, comparing the corrob- orated answers returned with real user clicks.