Web search privacy evaluation metrics

Privacy quantification methods are used to quantify the knowledge the adverse search engine has obtained with and without privacy protection mechanisms. Thus, these methods calculate privacy exposure. Private web search techniques are based on many methods (e.g., proxy service, query modification, query exchange, and others). This variety of techniques prompted the researchers to evaluate their work differently. This section introduces the metrics used to evaluate user privacy (protection). Moreover, this section also introduces the metrics used to evaluate the performance of privacy attacks and theoretical evaluation approaches.