Similarity functions try to capture the degree of belief about the equivalence of two entities, thus they play a crucial role in entity matching. The accuracy of the similarity functions highly depends on the applied assessment techniques, but also on some specific features of the entities. We propose systematic design strategies for combined similarity functions in this context. Our method relies on the combination of multiple evidences, with the help of estimated quality of the individual similarity values and with particular attention to missing information that is common in Web context. We study the effectiveness of our method in two specific instances of the general entity matching problem, namely the person name disambiguation and the Twitter message classification problem. In both cases, using our techniques in a very simple algorithmic framework we obtained better results than the state-of-the-art methods.