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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.
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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_325
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