Architecture that enables search engines to meet user expectations for search results (e.g., questions-answers) by improving on result consistency. This is attained by declining to answer queries when it is known by the system that the system is unable to answer more or equivalently prominent queries in the same query class in a vast majority of cases. To achieve consistency, queries are categorized into classes and then the queries of a specific class are segmented into clusters. The answer density in each cluster is then computed to determine the consistency of that class of queries. Clusters with a relatively low answer density are then suppressed to improve consistency for the user.