  We address the task of ranking objects (such as people, blogs, or verticals)
that, unlike documents, do not have direct term-based representations. To be
able to match them against keyword queries, evidence needs to be amassed from
documents that are associated with the given object. We present two design
patterns, i.e., general reusable retrieval strategies, which are able to
encompass most existing approaches from the past. One strategy combines
evidence on the term level (early fusion), while the other does it on the
document level (late fusion). We demonstrate the generality of these patterns
by applying them to three different object retrieval tasks: expert finding,
blog distillation, and vertical ranking.
