Rankings in Search Results with User Corrections

A computer storage medium encoded with a computer program, the program comprising instructions that when executed by data processing apparatus cause the data processing apparatus to perform operations, the operations comprising:

• receiving a description of a user correction involving a value characterizing an instance attribute, wherein the value is involved in the correction as either a corrected value or an uncorrected value;
• changing a confidence parameter reflecting the likelihood that the value correctly characterizes the instance attribute;
• and
• ranking a collection of candidate values that includes the value according to respective confidence parameters, including the changed a confidence parameter.

A system comprising:

• a client device comprising
• an input device,
• a display screen, and
• a digital data processing device operable to display, on the display screen, characterizations of instance attributes by values and to receive, over the input device, user input correcting characterizations of instance attributes;
• a correction tracker operable to interact with the client to track the user input correcting the characterizations of the instance attributes and to store descriptions of the user input in records of the user correction history;
• one or more data storage devices storing the records of the user correction history;
• and
• a search engine operable to interact with the one or more data storage devices to access the records of the user correction history and to change a confidence that a first value correctly characterizes a first instance attribute in response to identifying a record describing a user correction correcting the characterization of the first instance attribute.