Information retrieval techniques for evaluating search engines: a critical overview

The objective of this paper is to highlight the importance of a scientifically sounded approach to search engine evaluation. Nowadays there is a flourishing literature which describes various attempts at conducting such evaluation by following all sort of approaches, but very often only the final results are published with little, if any, information about the methodology and the procedures adopted. These various experiments have been critically investigated and catalogued according to their scientific foundation by Bell [1] in the attempt to provide a valuable framework for future studies in this area. This paper reconsiders some of Bell‘s ideas in the light of the crisis of classic evaluation techniques for information retrieval and tries to envisage some form of collaboration between the IR and web communities in order to design a better and more consistent platform for the evaluation of tools for interactive information retrieval.