A computer-implemented method for utilizing external knowledge and memory networks in a question-answering system includes receiving, from a search engine of a question-answering system, one or more search results based on a search query associated with a question submitted via a user interface associated with a computing device, analyzing the one or more search results to generate search evidence as a source of external knowledge for generating an answer to the question, the search evidence including one or more titles and one or more corresponding text snippets, encoding the search evidence and the search query to generate vectors stored in a memory network, obtaining a final vector representation based on the encoding, and decoding the final vector representation to obtain the answer to the question.