Editing Linear search (section)

==Application==
Linear search is usually very simple to implement, and is practical when the list has only a few elements, or when performing a single search in an un-ordered list.

When many values have to be searched in the same list, it often pays to pre-process the list in order to use a faster method. For example, one may [[sort (computing)|sort]] the list and use [[Binary search algorithm|binary search]], or build an efficient [[search data structure]] from it. Should the content of the list change frequently, repeated re-organization may be more trouble than it is worth.

As a result, even though in theory other search algorithms may be faster than linear search (for instance [[binary search]]), in practice even on medium-sized arrays (around 100 items or less) it might be infeasible to use anything else. On larger arrays, it only makes sense to use other, faster search methods if the data is large enough, because the initial time to prepare (sort) the data is comparable to many linear searches.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web |first=Adam |last=Horvath |url=http://blog.teamleadnet.com/2012/02/quicksort-binary-search-and-linear.html |title=Binary search and linear search performance on the .NET and Mono platform |access-date=19 April 2013 }}</ref>