19.3 Big O Notation
Searching algorithms all accomplish the same goal—finding an element (or elements) that matches a given search key, if such an element does, in fact, exist. There are, however, a number of things that differentiate search algorithms from one another. The major difference is the amount of effort they require to complete the search. One way to describe this effort is with Big O notation, which indicates how hard an algorithm may have to work to solve a problem. For searching and sorting algorithms, this depends particularly on how many data elements there are. In this chapter, we use Big O to describe the worst-case run times for various searching and sorting algorithms.
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