Web users can not be guaranteed that the results provided by Web search engines or recommender systems are either exhaustive or relevant to their search needs. Businesses have the commercial interest to rank higher on results or recommendations to attract more customers while Web search engines and recommender systems make their profit based on their advertisements. This research analyses the result rank relevance provided by the different Web search engines, metasearch engines, academic databases and recommender systems.

We propose an Intelligent Search Assistant (ISA) that addresses these issues from the perspective of end-users acting as an interface between users and the different search engines; it emulates a Web Search Recommender System for general topic queries where the user explores the results provided. Our ISA sends the original query, retrieves the provided options from the Web and reorders the results.

The proposed mathematical model of our ISA divides a user query into a multidimensional term vector. Our ISA is based on the Random Neural Network with Deep Learning Clusters. The potential value of each neuron or cluster is calculated by applying our innovative cost function to each snippet and weighting its dimension terms with different relevance parameters.

Our ISA adapts to the perceived user interest learning user relevance on an iterative process where the user evaluates directly the listed results. Gradient Descent and Reinforcement Learning are used independently to update the Random Neural Network weights and we evaluate their performance based on the learning speed and result relevance.

Finally, we present a new relevance metric which combines relevance and rank. We use this metric to validate and assess the learning performance of our proposed algorithm against other search engines. In some situations, our ISA and its iterative learning outperforms other search engines and recommender systems.