With the data structures that have been developed in the preceding chapters, one critical operation performed on all of them is searching. In this chapter, we shall explore the different strategies that can be used to find elements in a collection of items.
One other important operation that makes use of searching is sorting. It is virtually impossible to sort without some variant of a search operation. The "how of searching" is also important as it has a bearing on how quick a sorting algorithm ends up performing.
Searching algorithms are categorized under two broad types. One category assumes that the list of items to apply the searching operation on, has already been sorted whiles the other does not.
The performance of a search operation is heavily influenced by whether the items about to be searched have already been sorted or not as we will see in the subsequent topics too.