The Quality Indicators for an Information Retrieval System: User's Perspective

An IR system must be designed to satisfy a user's information need. To achieve quality results, the system must help users to construct quality searches. Thus the aim of this project was to identify a set of quality criteria and indicators to evaluate an IR system. Survey, observation, and self-reporting logs were used to compile a list of quality criteria and their indicators, and expected features from 250 users. The findings revealed quality criteria that include content, retrieval features (e.g. term density, term boosting, and fuzzy searching), user interface, thesaurus-enhanced search (e.g. visualization of search results), help and feedback mechanism, and administrative considerations