Searching and sorting algorithms have always been a big topic of research. People have worked long and hard to improve the efficiencies of searching and sorting. For the novice, the first$$ thing they tend to think about when needing to do a search is a simple linear search. Start at the beginning of the data and search forward until the item being looked for is found. This works well on small data sets but what about when we get into large data sets that have thousands of records? A simple linear search may be very time consuming.$$