CONSENTO: a consensus search engine for answering subjective queries

Search engines have become an important decision making tool today. Decision making queries are often subjective, such as 'best sedan for family use,' 'best action movies in 2010,' to name a few. Unfortunately, such queries cannot be answered properly by conventional search systems. In order to address this problem, we introduce Consento, a consensus search engine designed to answer subjective queries. Consento performs subdocument-level indexing to more precisely capture semantics from user opinions. We also introduce a new ranking method, or ConsensusRank that counts in online comments referring to an entity as a weighted vote to the entity. We validated the framework with an empirical study using the data on movie reviews.