Two paradigms currently exist for information search. The first is the library paradigm, which has been largely automated and is the prevailing paradigm in today’s web search. The second is the village paradigm, and although it is older than the library paradigm, its automation has not been considered, yet certain elements of its key aspects have been automated, as in the cases of the Q&A communities or novel services such as Quora. The increasing popularity and availability of online social networks and question-answering communities have encouraged revisiting of the automation of the village paradigm owing to new helpful developments, primarily that people are more connected with their acquaintances on the internet and their contact lists are available. In this survey, we study how the village paradigm is today partially automated: we consider the selection of candidates for answering questions, answering questions automatically and helping candidates to decide what questions to answer. Other aspects are also considered, for example, the automation of a reward system. We conclude that a next step towards the automation of the village paradigm involves intelligent agents that can leverage a P2P (peer-to-peer) social network, which will create new and interesting issues deeply entwined with social networks in the form of information processing by agents in parallel and side by side with people

Albert Trias acknowledges the PhD support grant Universitat de Girona BR/10. This work was partially funded by the MINECO projects IPT20120482430000 (MIDPOINT), Nuevos enfoques de preservacion digital con mejor gestion de costes que garantizan su sostenibilidad and IPT-430000-2010-13, Social powered Agents for Knowledge search Engine (SAKE), the EU DURAFILE no. 605356, FP7-SME-2013, BSG-SME (Research for SMEs) Innovative Digital Preservation using Social Search in Agent Environments, and the AGAUR grant for the CSI-ref.2009SGR-1202