Abstract
In view of the recent progress in the field of internet search engines, there is a growing need for mechanisms to evaluate the performance of these useful and popular tools. So far, the vast majority of researchers have relied on the information-retrieval metrics of "precision" and "recall" that quantify the occurrence of "hits" and "misses" in the returned list of documents. What they fail to do is to measure the quality of the ranking that the search engine has provided. This paper wants to rectify the situation. We discuss the issue in some detail, and then propose a new mechanism that we believe is better suited for our needs.