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Getting answers to natural language questions on the Web

Most popular search engines are not designed for answering natural language questions. However, when we asked hundreds of natural language questions of nine leading search engines, all retrieved at least one correct answer on more than three-quarters of the questions. We identified the best-performing search engines overall for factual natural language questions. We found performance differences depending on the domain of factual question asked. Other aspects of questions also predicted significantly different performance: the number of words in the question, the presence of a proper noun, and whether the question is time dependent. An additional analysis tested for differential performance by specific search engines on these four question factors. The analysis found no evidence for such interactions.