Abstract
Esfinge is a general domain Portuguese question answering system that participated in the last four editions of CLEF. This system uses the Web as a fundamental resource in its architecture, using information redundancy rather than sophisticated annotations of the document collections to retrieve answers. In this paper we describe experiments that took as starting point the version of Esfinge that participated at the evaluation contest CLEF 2007. These experiments consisted in using different types of search patterns to retrieve relevant documents for questions, as this issue (document retrieval) was responsible for most of the errors occurred at CLEF 2007.