A note on searching in a binary search tree

An algorithm for searching in a binary search tree using two‐way comparisons is presented. The number of comparisons required by this algorithm is only one more than when using three‐way comparisons. Since most high‐level programming languages do not supply three‐way comparisons, the number of comparisons used de facto is reduced by a factor of two. We give experimental results to indicate the speed‐up that may be achieved by the presented algorithm.