Searching in Data Structure

AI With Hariharan
4 min readMar 24, 2023

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Data structures are a way to organize and store data in an accessible, efficient manner. As a data structure grows in size, it can be difficult to find specific pieces of information.

Different search techniques within data structures can be used to find data in complex data structures. This blog post will take a closer look into the various search algorithms used within data structures.

The linear or sequential search is the most straightforward search algorithm. It traverses a data set one item at a while until you find your desired data. This algorithm is simple to understand and implement. However, large data sets can find it slow due to its O(n), time complexity formula. where n is how many items are in the data structure.

Binary search can be used with sorted arrays to find the most efficient search algorithm. This search algorithm uses sorted arrays to divide the search interval in half repeatedly until the target data is found. It has a time complexity O(log n), which makes it faster than linear searches for large datasets.

Data Structure

Data structures are the building blocks of abstract data types (ADT) in computer science. ADT is a logical representation of data types, while ADT is a physical implementation. Different data structures can be used for different purposes and tasks.

Data structures are a collection of data values, their relationships, operations, and functions that relate to them. This allows users to access and modify the information quickly and efficiently.

Data structures allow us to manage large amounts of information such as huge databases. Data structures that are efficient and well-organized provide the foundation for efficient algorithms. They also store information efficiently. They are responsible for quickly retrieving information from its stored locations. These include graphs, arrays, and searching programs Linked Pointers Stack Queue Struktur Sorting.

Searching in Data Structure

A data structure is a way to extract information from an array, linked-list, graph, tree, or other elements stored in computer memory. This is called searching. You can also search within these structures by searching for specific elements that have certain characteristics.

Search Methods

You can search within a data structure by using searching algorithms to extract or detect an element.

These algorithms can be classified according to their type of search operation, such as deductive or sequential searching.

Sequential traversal of an array of elements or list of elements requires checking each component individually, much like linear search.

Interval Search

Interval search is a method that’s specifically designed for searching data structures with sorted information. These algorithms are more efficient than linear search ones in terms of efficiency by two. Logarithmic Search, Binary Search are two examples.

These methods are rated based on how long it takes for an algorithm to search an element matching a query item in data collection.

  • The best possible time
  • The average time.
  • The Worst Case Time

Worst-case times are the most important concern. These provide guaranteed algorithms performance predictions and are easier to calculate than average times.

This article assumes that there are ’n’ items in any given data collection. For easier analysis and comparison of algorithms, dominant operations are used. A comparison is one such dominant operation denoted “O()” which can be pronounced either as “big-O”, or simply “Oh”.

Data structures provide many searching options, including linear search, binary, interpolation, search, sublist search Fibonacci sequence, exponential jump search Fibonacci sequence, search ubiquitous binary search unbounded binary and recursive function to search for an element linearly within an array. This article will cover linear search, binary, and interpolation algorithms as well as their working principles.

Search for interpolation

Interpolation search is a data structure searching technique that’s particularly efficient when working with sorted arrays. To predict the location of the target data, this algorithm uses the maximum and minimum values as well as the value of the target data. It has an average time complexity of O (log log n), which makes it faster than binary searches on larger data sets.

Jump Search

This search algorithm is suitable for sorted arrays. This algorithm divides the array into blocks of a fixed size, and then jumps through these blocks to find target data. This method has a time complexity O(n) and is faster than linear searches, but slower than interpolation or binary search.

Hashing, which is a method to quickly store and retrieve data from a data structure, is also a technique. The hash function maps the key to a specific location in the structure. This makes it easy to retrieve the data when required. The average time complexity for hashing is O(1), making it one of the fastest search algorithms.

Conclusion

It is crucial to understand the different types of data searching and the available algorithms in order to optimize its performance. For small datasets, linear search is the best. Binary and interpolation searches are more efficient for larger data sets. Jump search is effective when the data is evenly distributed. However, hashing can provide optimal solutions for large numbers of data. Understanding these search methods and their strengths and limitations will help you choose the right data structure optimization techniques.

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