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.