In a new model for answer retrieval, document collections are distilled offline into large repositories of facts. Each fact constitutes a potential direct answer to questions seeking a particular kind of entity or relation, such as questions asking about the date of particular events. Question answering becomes equivalent to online fact retrieval, which greatly simplifies the de-facto system architecture. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval--search process; H.3.1 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Context Analysis and Indexing-linguistic processing; I.2.7 [Artificial Intelligence]: Natural Language Processing--text analysis General Terms Algorithms, Experimentation Keywords Web information retrieval, lightweight text analysis, fact repositories, question answering