Overwhelmed, the user looks at a few sites. Some give wine price lists, some discuss wine growing, and one is about wine-colored clothing. The user sighs, logs off, and calls a friend for advice. Anyone who's used an Internet search engine can identify with that scenario. According to Myke Gluck, an associate professor at the School of Information Studies at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, two measures of the quality of a search engine are precision and recall.
Precision is the percentage of returned material that is actually relevant.
Recall is the percentage of relevant material returned, divided by the total relevant material available. By both measures, today's search engines are less than stellar. Yet all is not lost. Some technologies on the horizon promise to yield more intelligent search engines. And they'll also fetch more than just words.