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Web-search queries are typically short and ambiguous. To classify these queries into certain target categories is a difficult but important problem. In this article, we present a new technique called query enrichment, which takes a short query and maps it to intermediate objects. Based on the collected intermediate objects, the query is then mapped to target categories. To build the necessary mapping functions, we use an ensemble of search engines to produce an enrichment of the queries. Our technique was applied to the ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining competition (ACM KDDCUP) in 2005, where we won the championship on all three evaluation metrics (precision, F1 measure, which combines precision and recall, and creativity, which is judged by the organizers) among a total of 33 teams worldwide. In this article, we show that, despite the difficulty of an abundance of ambiguous queries and lack of …