Synonyms
Evaluation measures; Performance measures
Definition
Search engine metrics measure the ability of an information retrieval system (such as a web search engine) to retrieve and rank relevant material in response to a user’s query. In contrast to database retrieval, relevance in information retrieval depends on the natural language semantics of the query and document, and search engines can and do retrieve results that are not relevant. The two fundamental metrics are recall, measuring the ability of a search engine to find the relevant material in the index, and precision, measuring its ability to place that relevant material high in the ranking. Precision and recall have been extended and adapted to many different types of evaluation and task, but remain the core of performance measurement.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Recommended Reading
Aslam JA, Pavlu V, Yilmaz E. A statistical method for system evaluation using incomplete judgments. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2006. p. 541–8.
Carterette B, Allan J, Sitaraman RK. Minimal test collections for retrieval evaluation. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2006. p. 268–75.
Cleverdon CW. The cranfield tests on index language devices. In: Jones KS, Willett P, editors. Readings in information retrieval. Morgan Kaufmann; 1967. p. 47–59.
Cleverdon CW, Mills J. The testing of index language devices. In: Jones KS, Willett P, editors. Readings in information retrieval. Morgan Kaufmann; 1963. p. 98–110.
Kekalainen J, Jarvelin K. Using graded relevance assessments in IR evaluation. JASIST. 2002;53(13):1120–9.
Papineni K, Roukos S, Ward T, Zhu WJ. BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics; 2002. p. 311–8.
van Rijsbergen CJ. Information retrieval. London: Butterworths; 1979.
Salton G, Lesk ME. Computer evaluation of indexing and text processing. In: Jones KS, Willett P, editors. Readings in information retrieval. Morgan Kaufmann; 1967. p. 60–84.
Soboroff I. Dynamic test collections: measuring search effectiveness on the live web. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 2006. p. 276–83.
Sparck JK, van Rijsbergen CJ. Information retrieval test collections. J Doc. 1976;32(1):59–75.
Voorhees E. Variations in relevance judgments and the measurement of retrieval effectiveness. In: Proceedings of the 21st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1998. p. 315–23.
Voorhees EM, Harman DK, editors. TREC: experiment and evaluation in information retrieval. Cambridge, MA: MIT; 2005.
Zobel J. How reliable are the results of large-scale information retrieval experiments? In: Proceedings of the 21st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval; 1998. p. 307–14.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Carterette, B. (2018). Search Engine Metrics. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_325
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_325
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8266-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8265-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering