Efficient search engine measurements

We address the problem of measuring global quality met-rics of search engines, like corpus size, index freshness, anddensity of duplicates in the corpus. The recently proposedestimators for such metrics 2, 6 suffer from significant biasand/or poor performance, due to inaccurate approximationof the so called .document degrees..We present two new estimators that are able to overcomethe bias introduced by approximate degrees. Our estimatorsare based on a careful implementation of an approximateimportance sampling procedure. Comprehensive theoreti-cal and empirical analysis of the estimators demonstratesthat they have essentially no bias even in situations wheredocument degrees are poorly approximated.Building on an idea from 6, we discuss Rao Blackwelliza-tion as a generic method for reducing variance in searchengine estimators. We show that Rao-Blackwellizing ourestimators results in significant performance improvements,while not compromising accuracy.