What is Result collapsing?
Verified 5 August 2026
A wire story republished by forty outlets is forty near-identical documents. Ranked by relevance they take every slot, and an agent reading them concludes — reasonably but wrongly — that the claim is exceptionally well supported because it saw it ten times.
Collapsing by story cluster returns one representative per cluster with a group size attached, converting ten wasted slots into ten distinct facts.
The important subtlety is that collapsing must not destroy the corroboration signal. unlob records the host of every rejected duplicate against the surviving passage, so independent source counts still reflect every outlet that carried the story.
How unlob handles this: Deduplication
Common questions
What is Result collapsing?
Collapsing groups near-identical results and returns one representative each, so a single syndicated item cannot occupy an entire result set.
How does Result collapsing work in practice?
Collapsing by story cluster returns one representative per cluster with a group size attached, converting ten wasted slots into ten distinct facts.
See it working
The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card — enough to test any of this against your own queries.