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Search Engine Metrics

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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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.

Historical Background

Performance measurement of information retrieval systems began with Cleverdon and Mills in the early 1960s with the Cranfield tests of language indexing devices [4,3]....

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Ben Carterette

Authors
  1. Ben Carterette
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Carterette, B. (2009). Search Engine Metrics. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_325

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