searching and sorting when people collect and work with datathey eventually want to search for specific items within the collection or sort the collection for presentation or easy access searching and sorting are two of the most common applications found in computer science in this we explore these important topics and study some of the basic algorithms for use with sequence structures the searching problem will be discussed many times throughout the text as it can be applied to collections stored using many different data structuresnot just sequences we will also further explore the sorting problem in and with discussion of more advanced sorting algorithms searching searching is the process of selecting particular information from collection of data based on specific criteria you are familiar with this concept from your experience in performing web searches to locate pages containing certain words or phrases or when looking up phone number in the telephone book in this textwe restrict the term searching to refer to the process of finding specific item in collection of data items the search operation can be performed on many different data structures the sequence searchwhich is the focus in this involves finding an item within sequence using search key to identify the specific item key is unique value used to identify the data elements of collection in collections containing simple types such as integers or realsthe values themselves are the keys for collections of complex typesa specific data component has to be identified as the key in some instancesa key may consist of multiple componentswhich is also known as compound key