It's a bit confusing to distinguish between heuristic search and informed one. Hence, heuristic search is a search with information in it's basic definition!
Heuristic Search is guaranteed method to find out the best solution but this method might not always find out the best solution for your problem. You may find it very well explained here:
I break the inequality of Nicolas by the fact that both are the same with no difference. That is:
- An heuristic is an information you use to guide your search, most of the time with the hope to obtain a good result with less complexity(Tradeoff). That is why, we talk about informed search.
Exple: if you are looking for one of your friend in the City, instead of moving home to home(Brute force is too complex), you may try the best friends' houses first(That is your heuristic).
Depending on the relevance of the information(Heuristic) you possess, you will get some accuracy.
Depending on the book or author, you will sometimes hear Heuristic/Informed.
It largely depends on how you define heuristics....
if Meta-Heuristic are considered as problem-independent strategies as opposite to heuristics which are problem-dependent strategies, then all meta-Heuristics are informed search methods without heuristics.... such as Swarm Intelligence.
Informed search algorithms are Heuristic algorithms. Further the heuristics algorithms could be categorised as global (example: A*, IDA*, ADA*, ARA* algorithms) and local search (Hill Climbing, Enforced Hill Climing, Beam Search). So in this respect, the informed search are heuristic search, and in order to search from initial state to the goal state they use information which is not the same case with uninformed algorithms (blind algorithms).