A Systematic Comparative Study of Linear, Binary and Interpolation Search Algorithms

The searching denotes a process that aims to find a specific item in the data set. After performing the process of searching, the desired items are likely found or not. This kind of investigations was actually demonstrated by some researchers. For each search algorithm, the previous studies just focused to obtain the search time but did not obtain the number of passed-nodes. Furthermore, the results obtained with regards to the search time were not reported systematically. Hence, this study investigates how fast the desired items were found and how few passed-nodes were obtained when searching desired items by using three search algorithms. These algorithms were linear, binary, and interpolation algorithms. By using search algorithms, one hundred twenty desired items were searched in a collection of active-student data (3946 records in total). The search time needed to find a specific item and the number of passed nodes were recorded. The results showed that the searching process with linear search algorithm required more time and more passed-nodes than binary and interpolation search algorithms. Following this, searching time and the number of passed-nodes for desired items were significantly smaller for binary search than for the interpolation search algorithm. Taken together, the present results suggested that the binary search could be considered as a solid algorithm in searching a specific item in the data set utilized by the current study.