The number of direct answers provided to users could be expanded, at minimal cost, the researchers argue. About 50 percent of the queries that search engines get are completely novel, Bernstein said. But the rest are questions that are repeatedly asked. At least some of these queries have answers that can easily be generated, and checked through some simple crowd-sourcing.

"We are focusing on a set of queries that are somewhat popular," Bernstein said. "We can create thousands of these answers." In the future, a search service could provide direct answers to many additional questions, such as how to shut down a stalled Apple Mac computer, what the average body temperature is for a dog, how to bake a potato, or how to play the Rummy 500 card game.

In a trial experiment, the researchers had data mining software comb through 75 million search queries from Microsoft's Bing search engine, looking for those queries that resulted in a click through to a single site. They then identified those queries that could be succinctly answered and contracted workers to quickly craft simple answers and proofread the work. They found these workers through Amazon's Mechanical Turk, by way of a third party service called Crowdflower.

By automating as much of the process of creating the content as possible, search engines can keep their costs minimal. Search engines could contract out the manual labor on a piecemeal basis, using services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The researchers identified about 20,000 queries that could be easily provided with answers. They estimated it would cost search engines about .44 cents to provide a simple answer for each query.

Bernstein admitted that this approach, should it be used, would raise a number of issues. For one, search engines would have to filter out incorrect information somehow. Also, search engines would risk the ire of Web site owners, who would complain that the answers deprives them of Internet traffic, because the search engine itself is providing the answer. "We have to ask ourself whether we are going too far," he said.