Search algorithms

1. Searching

Looking for a specific piece of information within a group of data items (called a data set) is known as 'searching'.

Searching is a very common task in computing. So common, in fact, that a lot of effort has been put into creating algorithms to do this task as efficiently as possible.

For this syllabus, the two search algorithms you need to understand are:-

• Linear search
• Binary search

This section describes linear and binary search algorithms along with their advantages and disadvantages.