A system and method for information retrieval are disclosed. The method includes querying a multimedia collection with a first component of a multimedia query (e.g., a text-based part of the query) to generate first comparison measures between the first component of the query and respective objects in the collection for a first media type (e.g., text). The multimedia collection is queried with a second component of the multimedia query (e.g., an image-based part of the query) to generate second comparison measures between the second component of the query and respective objects in the collection for a second media type (e.g., visual). An aggregated score for each of a set of objects in the collection is computed, based on the first comparison measure and the second comparison measure for the object. This includes applying an aggregating function to the first and second comparison measures in which a first confidence weighting is applied to the first comparison measure and a second confidence weighting is applied to the second comparison measure. The first confidence weighting is independent of the second comparison measure. The second confidence weighting is dependent on the first comparison measure. Information based on the aggregated scores is output.