What Are Precision and Recall and Why Are They Needed in Search Engines?

In this post, I am going to talk about precision and recall and their importance in information retrieval. First of all, let’s talk about what we mean by information retrieval. Suppose you wake up one morning and decide you want to make muffins for breakfast. You take out your laptop and search for “healthy muffin recipe” on Google. Then, you go through the search results, decide on a recipe and get started on it. This is an example of information retrieval where the search engine (Google in this case) retrieved the results for your search query “healthy muffin recipe”. 

Continue reading

Using Search Engines to Uncover Sensitive Data on the Web

Search engines are powerful tools that can really help you with your work. Apart from finding useful resources and interesting articles, a search engine can be used for other practical purposes. Specifically, if you don’t know which word to use exactly in the phrase you are writing down, or if you do not remember how to spell it, you can use a search engine to find an answer. You can also search for specific terms within a web page and make sure if they exist or not. Continue reading