An empirical user rating of popular search engines using RankPower

We present in this paper the effectiveness and the feasibility of measuring search engine efficiency using RankPower, a single value measurement. RankPower rates the search engines by computing the number and the rank of relevant URLs among the returned results. This is different from traditional performance measures of information retrieval systems using the precision and recall rates. The RankPower is much more easier to compute and much more intuitive for ordinary Web search users. The conclusions are supported by a set of empirical results collected from the experiments that the authors designed and carried out.