Searching

An important operation for all data structures is searching for elements from a collection of data. There are various methods to search for an element in data structures; in this chapter, we shall explore the different strategies that can be used to find elements in a collection of items.

Data elements can be stored in any kind of data structure, such as an array, link list, tree, or graph; the search operation is very important for many applications, mostly whenever we want to know if a particular data element is present in an existing list of data items. In order to retrieve the information efficiently, we require an efficient search algorithm.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following:

• Various search algorithms
• Linear search algorithm
• Jump search algorithm
• Binary search algorithm
• Interpolation search algorithm
• Exponential search algorithm

Let us start with an introduction to searching and a definition...