This paper presents an experimental study of users assessing the quality of Google web search results. In particular we look at how users' satisfaction correlates with the effectiveness of Google as quantified by IR measures such as precision, Bpref and the suite of Cumulative Gain measures (CG, DCG, NDCG). Results indicate strong correlation between users' satisfaction, CG and precision, moderate correlation with DCG, with perhaps surprisingly negligible correlation with NDCG. The reasons for the low correlation with NDCG are examined.

The authors investigate factors influencing user satisfaction in information retrieval. It is evident from this study that user satisfaction is a subjective variable, which can be influenced by several factors such as system effectiveness, user effectiveness, user effort, and user characteristics and expectations. Therefore, information retrieval evaluators should consider all these factors in obtaining user satisfaction and in using it as a criterion of system effectiveness. Previous studies have conflicting conclusions on the relationship between user satisfaction and system effectiveness; this study has substantiated these findings and supports using user satisfaction as a criterion of system effectiveness.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Higher Education Institutions (HEI) replaced regular face-to-face teaching with online teaching and learning. However, the shift caused several academic and social concerns for students, such as lack of academic support, lack of adequate resources to support online teaching, lack of socialization, stress, anxiety, and lack of motivation in attending classes. This research evaluates the impact of HEIs support, faculty support, and resources available on the academic and social concerns of students in HEIs during the pandemic. 11,114 students across the HEIs in Sultanate of Oman participated in an online national survey. Regression and factor analysis were used to verify the research model developed based on the literature review. Results showed that HEI support and faculty support significantly affect university students' academic and social concerns. Furthermore, resource availability was found to affect the academic concerns of students but not their social concerns. This research recommends strategies for HEIs and faculty to promote faculty-student interaction using both synchronous and asynchronous modes to reduce student concerns and motivate them to engage in online classes.

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This paper investigates the agreement of relevance assessments between official TREC judgments and those generated from an interactive IR experiment. Results show that 63% of documents judged relevant by our users matched official TREC judgments. Several factors contributed to differences in the agreements: the number of retrieved relevant documents; the number of relevant documents judged; system effectiveness per topic and the ranking of relevant documents.

Industrial Estates are significant for the growth of any economy. In this research, the business mangers' perceptions of the internal and external obstacles facing medium and large enterprises in the Industrial Estates are collected and analyzed. The research is conducted with special reference to the Rusayl Industrial Estate (RIE), a prominent Industrial Estate in Oman. A structured questionnaire was administered to a sample of 42 enterprises in the RIE. The survey discovered that medium enterprises reported more obstacles, both internal and external, compared to larger enterprises. Among a variety of external barriers, the lack of raw materials, the lack of skilled workers, visas for foreign workers and the high interest rate of business loans, are at the top of the list. The most significant internal obstacles are competitive pressure in the market, difficulty of external marketing, high labor cost and high operating cost. Some challenges, such as lack of skilled workers and difficulty getting visas for foreign workers are common to medium and large enterprises alike. The study emphasized the need for strategic intervention by regulatory agencies primarily aimed to mitigate the various challenges and provide a conducive environment for enterprises to develop.

Abstract. In this paper we describe our submission for iCLEF2006: an interface that allows users to search FLICKR in Arabic for images with captions in a range of languages. We report and discuss the results gained from a user experiment in accordance with directives given by iCLEF, including an analysis of the success of search tasks. To enable the searching of multilingual image annotations we use English as an interlingua. An Arabic-English dictionary is used for initial query translation, and then Babelfish is used to translate between English and French, German, Italian, Dutch and Spanish. Users are able to modify the English version of the query if they have the necessary language skills to do so. We have chosen to experiment with Arabic retrieval from FLICKR due to the growing numbers of online Middle Eastern users, the limited numbers of interactive Arabic user studies for cross-language IR to date, and the availability of resources to undertake a user study.

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