| Feature | Uninformed Search | Informed Search |
|---|
| Also Known As | Blind Search | Heuristic Search |
| Uses Heuristic? | ❌ No | ✅ Yes (h(n) function used) |
| Guidance | No knowledge about goal direction | Uses domain-specific knowledge to guide search |
| Goal Direction | Explores blindly | Goal-directed exploration |
| Efficiency | Less efficient, explores more nodes | More efficient with a good heuristic |
| Optimality | Only UCS is optimal | A* is optimal with admissible heuristic |
| Completeness | BFS, UCS are complete | A*, Greedy Best-First can be complete (depends on h(n)) |
| Time & Space | High due to exhaustive search | Lower (if heuristic is good) |
| Examples | BFS, DFS, UCS, DLS, IDDFS | A*, Greedy Best-First, RBFS, IDA* |
| Use Case | When no domain knowledge is available | When domain knowledge or heuristics are available |