Linear search

The search operation is used to find out the index position of a given data item in a list of data items. If the searched item is available in the given list of data items, then the search algorithm returns the index position where it is located; otherwise, it returns that the item is not found. Here, the index position is the location of the desired item in the given list.

The simplest approach to search for an item in a list is to search linearly, in which we look for items one by one in the whole list. Let’s take an example of six list items {60, 1, 88, 10, 11, 100} to understand the linear search algorithm, as shown in Figure 10.1:

Figure 10.1: An example of linear search

The preceding list has elements that can be accessed through the index. To find an element in the list, we can search for the given element linearly one by one. This technique traverses the list of elements by using the index to move from the beginning of the list to the...