1. A method of disambiguating online social mentions of a real-world entity, the method including: selecting one or more core entity attributes that represent a real-world entity as a first search attribute set for use in searching biographical sources; receiving, responsive to searching the biographical sources based on the first search attribute set, entity reflections that include supplemental entity attributes for the real-world entity; using a combination of the selected core entity attributes and one or more supplemental entity attributes to define a second search attribute set that is narrower than the first search attribute set; receiving, responsive to searching further web sources based on the second search attribute set, more entity reflections that include meta entity attributes for the real-world entity; and updating the combination to include one or more of the meta entity attributes.
6. The method of claim 1 , further including applying one or more probability distribution functions or joint probability distribution functions to estimate resulting cohort size of entity reflections responsive to the first search attribute set.