A new three levels context based approach for web search engines evaluation

International audienceClassical approaches for evaluating information retrieval tools have limitations and shortcomings, particularly regarding to the consideration of the user, the manner in which these approaches measure the adequacy between the user's query and the returned documents, and the consideration of the search tool characteristics. This critical finding prompted our reflections for the exploitation of contextual elements around the user, the query and the search tool during the evaluation process. This paper presents a new approach based on three complementary levels of context for evaluating information retrieval tools. The experiments gives at the end of this article has shown the applicability of the proposed approach to real research tools. The tests were performed with the most popular searching engine (i.e. Google, Bing and Yahoo) selected in particular for their high selectivity. The results have revealed that the evaluation of search engines at three different levels of context is a promising way to diagnose the performance, characteristics and behavior of these engines and the relevance of the results that they return