In our previous discussion of lists, stacks, and queues, the purposes of these structures are designed to store information, which should be retrieved for frequent usage.
Information retrieval is one of the interesting issues in computer engineering and computer science.
The challenge of information retrieval includes the efficiency of storage usage, as well as the speed, which is important for fast retrieval. Searching means to retrieve a record of data from a structure or from a database, which may contain hundreds or even several millions of records. The storage structure of these records is the essential factor, which affects the speed of search. However, a good searching strategy also influences the speed, even on the same underlying storage structure. In this chapter, we will discuss the strategies, which can be used for information retrieval on different storage structures.