Retrievability is a term associated with the ease with which information can be found or retrieved using an information system, specifically a
search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
or
information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...
system.
A document (or information object) has high retrievability if there are many queries which retrieve the document via the search engine, and the document is ranked sufficiently high that a user would encounter the document. Conversely, if there are few queries that retrieve the document, or when the document is retrieved the documents are not high enough in the ranked list, then the document has low retrievability.
Retrievability can be considered as one aspect of
findability Findability is the ease with which information contained on a website can be found, both from outside the website (using search engines and the like) and by users already on the website. Although findability has relevance outside the World Wide Web, ...
.
Applications of retrievability include detecting
search engine bias
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are typically ...
, measuring algorithmic bias, evaluating the influence of search technology, tuning information retrieval systems and evaluating the quality of documents in a
collection
Collection or Collections may refer to:
Computing
* Collection (abstract data type), the abstract concept of collections in computer science
* Collection (linking), the act of linkage editing in computing
* Garbage collection (computing), autom ...
.
See also
*
Information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...
*
Knowledge mining
*
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of Web traffic, website traffic to a website or a web page from web search engine, search engines. SEO targets unpaid search traffic (usually referred to as ...
*
Findability Findability is the ease with which information contained on a website can be found, both from outside the website (using search engines and the like) and by users already on the website. Although findability has relevance outside the World Wide Web, ...
References
*
*{{cite book, author1=Azzopardi, L. , author2=Vinay, V. , name-list-style=amp , chapter=Accessibility in information retrieval, title=Proceedings of the IR research, 30th European conference on Advances in information retrieval, year=2008, pages=482–489, publisher=Springer, location=Glasgow, UK, series=ECIR '08, isbn=9783540786450 , chapter-url=http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1793333, accessdate=7 Dec 2016
Web design
Knowledge representation
Information science