If two retrievers have identical precision@10 and recal...

Precision@10 and recall@10 give a coarse view of performance but can hide critical differences that matter in production. For example, one retriever might retrieve a relevant document at rank 1 (recall@5 = 1.0) while the other only at rank 10, leading to the same precision@10/recall@10 scores. To make an informed shipping decision, ask for the distribution of relevant document ranks, mean reciprocal rank (MRR), or normalized discounted cumulative gain (nDCG) at the specific cutoff used in your system. These finer‑grained metrics reveal which retriever delivers relevant results earlier, which typically translates to better user experience.