  The search engine evaluation research has quite a lot metrics available to
it. Only recently, the question of the significance of individual metrics
started being raised, as these metrics' correlations to real-world user
experiences or performance have generally not been well-studied. The first part
of this thesis provides an overview of previous literature on the evaluation of
search engine evaluation metrics themselves, as well as critiques of and
comments on individual studies and approaches. The second part introduces a
meta-evaluation metric, the Preference Identification Ratio (PIR), that
quantifies the capacity of an evaluation metric to capture users' preferences.
Also, a framework for simultaneously evaluating many metrics while varying
their parameters and evaluation standards is introduced. Both PIR and the
meta-evaluation framework are tested in a study which shows some interesting
preliminary results; in particular, the unquestioning adherence to metrics or
their ad hoc parameters seems to be disadvantageous. Instead, evaluation
methods should themselves be rigorously evaluated with regard to goals set for
a particular study.
