Page "Collation" Paragraph 3

The main advantage of collation is that it makes it fast and easy for a user to find an element in the list, or to confirm that it is absent from the list.

In automatic systems this can be done using a binary search algorithm or interpolation search ; manual searching may be performed using a roughly similar procedure, though this will often be done unconsciously.

Other advantages are that one can easily find the first or last elements on the list ( most likely to be useful in the case of numerically sorted data ), or elements in a given range ( useful again in the case of numerical data, and also with alphabetically ordered data when one may be sure of only the first few letters of the sought item or items ).