2. Data set and search criteria

To begin a search, you need to know two things: what you are looking for and where you are going to look.

We call the first item the search criteria.

The second is the data set, and can be anything from a list in computer memory, to an open file from secondary storage, to a database.

Example

Let the data set be a list in memory consisting of (dog, cat, lion, penguin, ant)

and let the search criteria be 'cat'.

The task of the search algorithm is to determine if 'cat' is in the given data set.