The IIT Information Retrieval (IR) Lab has an extensive background in developing next generation search technology. As such, the lab has a unique ability to evaluate existing commercial technology, because we are able to compare commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions to new algorithms developed in our lab. By building our own search technology, we have a detailed understanding of how a search engine works that surpasses an organization that simply installs a search engine and executes it.

The IIT With search technology there are two key metrics. The first is efficiency; the second is effectiveness. It is immaterial how fast a search is performed if it brings back irrelevant results. The goal is to efficiently obtain relevant documents in response to a user.

With the continuous advances in search technology, there exists a need to independently assess the effectiveness, efficiency, and a variety of less tangible metrics (e.g.; ease of integration of other tools such as entity tagging, categorization, summarization) of key intranet search engines. Our current efforts focus on precisely such an evaluation with the goal of developing highly accurate and efficient search systems.