User-oriented metrics for search engine deterministic sort orders

Alistair Moffat

Abstract: Highlights•Sort-by-price product search result pages are important in e-commerce.•They should be evaluated by taking both relevance and relative item pricing into account.•A proposal for doing so by Trotman and Kitchen sometimes leads to questionable conclusions.•To avoid these issues an alternative mechanism called Price Biased Gain (PBG) is introduced.•PBG is motivated by consideration of how users react to sort-by-price results pages.