This experimental study proposes a multi-document summarization method that produces optimal summaries in which users can find answers to their queries. In order to identify the most effective method for this purpose, the performance of the three summarization methods were compared. The investigated methods are sentence clustering, passage extraction through spreading activation, and clustering-passage extraction hybrid methods. The effectiveness of each summarizing method was evaluated by two criteria used to measure the accuracy and the redundancy of a summary. The passage extraction method using the sequential bnb search algorithm proved to be most effective in summarizing multiple documents with regard to summarization precision. This study proposes the passage extraction method as the optimal multi-document summarization method.