Corroborating Answers from Multiple Web Sources

The Internet has changed the way people look for information. Users now expect the answers to their questions to be available through a simple web search. Web search engines 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 Unfortunately, many web sources are not trustworthy, because of erroneous, misleading, biased, or outdated information.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 corroborating 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 aggregated answers to the users, our techniques consider the number, importance, and similarity of the web sources reporting each answer, as well as the importance of the answer ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WEBDB
• Authors: Minji Wu, Amélie Marian
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Simple Web Search, Web Search, Web Sources, WEBDB 2007