Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Coherent Measurement Of Web-Search Relevance, William Mahoney, Peter Hospodka, William Sousan, Ryan Nickell, Qiuming Zhu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a metric for quantitatively assessing the quality of Web searches. The relevance-of-searching-on-target index measures how relevant a search result is with respect to the searcher's interest and intention. The measurement is established on the basis of the cognitive characteristics of common user's online Web-browsing behavior and processes. We evaluated the accuracy of the index function with respect to a set of surveys conducted on several groups of our college students. While the index is primarily intended to be used to compare the Web-search results and tell which is more relevant, it can be extended to other applications. For …