Seek and You Will (Probably) Find: Helping Mine COVID-19 Research Data | NIST

Seek and You Will (Probably) Find: Helping Mine COVID-19 Research Data | NIST

Seek and You Will (Probably) Find: Helping Mine COVID-19 Research Data

By Ellen Voorhees, a senior research scientist in the NIST Information Technology Laboratory

Think back to the last time you did an information search. Did you find what you were looking for? How easy was it to find? Search is now pervasive, and we generally assume we’ll be able to find information we want. So, by that definition, search engines are good (enough). How did they get that good? How good are they, actually? Could they be better? Is a search engine doing a good job if it only shows what you expected to find? These are important measurement questions because we cannot build better search systems if we do not know how good current systems are.

My group at NIST develops the infrastructure necessary to evaluate the quality of search engines.