Where this one gets misread
Quoted alone, either number is meaningless. Perfect precision is available to anyone willing to return a single result. Both need the reference set and somebody's definition of relevant attached.
Glossary
Recall is the share of relevant items a system found; precision is the share of what it found that was relevant. Neither counts until you define relevant.
Updated 21 Aug 2026
Quoted alone, either number is meaningless. Perfect precision is available to anyone willing to return a single result. Both need the reference set and somebody's definition of relevant attached.
Ask for a worked example on your own material, and the evidence needed to reproduce it.
We use “Recall and precision” only where a product mechanism or an evaluation method backs it up, and we say when the behaviour depends on how a deployment is configured.
Pick a real piece of work, agree what a good answer looks like, then go through the results together.