Usually O(log(N)) or O(N) is great, but that was the performance for one execution each method.

An application that prints the frequency of occurrence of each word in a document with N total words and M distinct words, must do N get operations, plus N put operations to insert the words into a symbol table.

Then it must iterate through the M distinct keys and do M more get operations.

Comparing the two classes just for building the symbol table:

class	cost for insertion	Total
SequentialSearchST	N gets: N * O(N) = O(N²) N puts: N * O(N) = O(N²) total: O(N²) + O(N²)	= O(N²)
BinarySearchSt	N gets: N * O(log(N)) = O(Nlog(N)) N puts: N * O(N) = O(N²) total: O(Nlog(N)) + O(N²)	=O(N²)

See code examples

Application Performance