notes the difference lies in the fact that the first method moves data only over small distances in the process of sortingwhereas the second method moves data over large distancesso that items settle into the proper order soonerthus resulting in fewer comparisons performance of sorting algorithm can also depend on the degree of order already present in the data there are two basic categories of sorting methodsinternal sorting and external sorting internal sorting is applied when the entire collection of data to be sorted is small enough so that the sorting can take place within the main memory the time required to read or write is not considered to be significant in evaluating the performance of internal sorting methods external sorting methods are applied to larger collection of data which reside on secondary devices read and write access times are major concern in determining sorting performances of such methods searching is the process of looking for somethingfinding one piece of data that has been stored within whole group of data it is often the most time-consuming part of many computer programs there are variety of methodsor algorithmsused to search for data itemdepending on how much data there is to look throughwhat kind of data it iswhat type of structure the data is stored inand even where the data is stored inside computer memory or on some external medium till nowwe have studied variety of data structurestheir typestheir use and so on in this we will concentrate on some techniques to search particular data or piece of information from large amount of data there are basically two types of searching techniqueslinear or sequential search and binary search searching is very common task in day-to-day lifewhere we are involved some or other timein searching either for some needful at home or office or marketor searching word in dictionary in this we see that if the things are organised in some mannerthen search becomes efficient and fast all the above facts apply to our computer programs also suppose we have telephone directory stored in the memory in an array which contains name and numbers nowwhat happens if we have to find numberthe answer is search that number in the array according to name (givenif the names were organised in some ordersearching would have been fast internal sorting the function of sorting or ordering list of objects according to some linear order is so fundamental that it is ubiquitous in engineering applications in all disciplines there are two broad categories of sorting methodsinternal sorting takes place in the main memorywhere we can take advantage of the random access nature of the main memoryexternal sorting is necessary when the number and size of objects are prohibitive to be accommodated in the main memory problem given records rnwith key values knproduce the records in the order ri ri rinsuch that ki <ki <<kin the complexity of sorting algorithm can be measured in terms of (anumber of algorithm steps to sort records (bnumber of comparisons between keys (appropriate when the keys are long character strings(cnumber of times records must be moved (appropriate when record size is largelovely professional university