P.: Web Information Retrieval: Towards Social Information Search Assistants

Searching for information is commonly an individual task which aims at solving any information need. To do that, one may go to a library, or go surfing the Web in order to find relevant information. Indeed, due to the large amount of available documents, the Web has become a favorite information source for solving daily information needs. An issue remains: the Web is in perpetual evolution; so the problem is less the existence of relevant information rather than the way users find it. One may compare searching for information on the Web with “looking for a needle in a haystack. ” Thus, searching the Web suffers from many limits that can be reduced by using a search assistant. Such an assistant helps the user to find relevant information on the Web. At the beginning, those assistants were principally helping each user individually. Nowadays, we are witness-ing the rise of social approaches in such systems. Those latter systems help users to find relevant information by using other users ’ experience, shared information … Therefore, each user is helped thanks to the mass crowd. This chapter underlines this search assistants evolution, it is organized as follows: section 1 introduces the underlying concepts and limits of traditional information search process and its application to the Web. Sec-tion 2 explains the search assistant concept by detailing their evolution from individual to social approaches. Sections 3 up to 5 present current approaches that search assistants may use to help any user to query an