Abstract
This paper starts by describing Esfinge, a general domain Portuguese question answering system that uses the redundancy available in the Web as an important resource to find its answers. The paper also presents the strategies employed to participate in CLEF-2004 and discusses the results obtained. Three different strategies were tested: searching the answers only in the CLEF document collection, searching the answers in the Web and using the CLEF document collection to confirm these answers and finally searching the answers only in the Web. The intriguing question of why the system performed better when joining the two information sources, even though it was designed for the Web is discussed; in this connection, different language varieties and some problems of Google are mentioned. The paper concludes describing some of the work planned for the near future.
