https://www.kshivendu.dev/blog Kumar Shivendu's blog en-us mail@kshivendu.dev (Kumar Shivendu) mail@kshivendu.dev (Kumar Shivendu) Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.kshivendu.dev/blog/relevance-tail https://www.kshivendu.dev/blog/relevance-tail Search evals are broken. We track p50/p99 for latency because an average hides the tail, then report search quality as one average NDCG and call it a day. A mean of 52.5 can sit on top of a fifth of queries finding nothing at all. Track p25 and p50 alongside the mean. Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT mail@kshivendu.dev (Kumar Shivendu) searchevalsevaluationmetrics