Linear Search

• This algorithm is used to find a key item linearly from the list of many items.
• What does it mean by "linear" search ?
  • we know that arrays are stored in memory in linear fashion, which means consecutive elements are actually stored next to each other. So when we want to search a item from this array, algorithm starts from first element and compares it with our key item, and then goes on next consecutive element till key element is found or list ends.

Pseudocode

      procedure linear_search (list, value)
        for each item in the list
          if match item == value
              return the item's location
          end if
        end for
      end procedure
      

Use this animation to understand it better...

Go ahead, enter a key item to search from given list, and later you can try enter your own list and search your desired item

Linear search is very simple and basic kind of search algorithm. It's time complexity is O(N). So, for very minor search tasks this may be used, but it cannot be used for large real world search problems. For a better search algorithm we can see Binary Search algoritm whose time complexity is O(log N) which is comparatively much better than linear search but adds the overhead of sorting the data.