OpenSearch: Lessons Learned from an Online Evaluation Campaign

We report on our experience with TREC OpenSearch, an online evaluation campaign that enabled researchers to evaluate their experimental retrieval methods using real users of a live website. Specifically, we focus on the task of ad hoc document retrieval within the academic search domain, and work with two search engines, CiteSeerX and SSOAR, that provide us with traffic. We describe our experimental platform, which is based on the living labs methodology, and report on the experimental results obtained. We also share our experiences, challenges, and the lessons learned from running this track in 2016 and 2017.