Thursday, January 11, 2007

Definitions #3

Recall: Related to precision, this is the degree in which a search engine returns all the matching documents in a collection. There may be 100 matching documents, but a search engine may only find 80 of them. It would then list these 80 and have a recall of 80%.

Relevancy: How well a document provides the information a user is looking for, as measured by the user.

Search Engine: The software that searches an index and returns matches. Search engine is often used synonymously with spider and index, although these are separate components that work with the engine.

Spider: The software that scans documents and adds them to an index by following links. Spider is often used as a synonym for search engine.

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