what are the ten different forms of search

Looking on the net, looking behind sofa, looking in book, looking in sofa, checking pockets, ask son, ask wife, manhunt, use bloodhound, place ad in personal pages.

From your tag, you seem to be asking about Internet search engines? Do you need the different forms of search or the different search methods?

Maybe somebody else knows more, but I can only think of four basic types of search engine;
Web crawlers – automatically browse the web following any hyperlinks found and retrieving pages eg Google.co.uk
Meta-search – sends the search criterion into several search engine and presents the results eg Dogpile.com
Specialist directories – databases of information on specific subject(s) built by human selection and organised into subject categories eg about.com
Searchable databases also known as “the invisible web” – search criteria are sent to a specialised library and results are returned in a page dynamically generated (web crawlers cannot find this information as it only exists when the query is run). eg Pathfinder (www.pathfinder/berkeley.edu)

If you were asking about different types of search, I can think of more than 10. I think the most common are likely to be (I would check these as it’s a long time since I studied programming algorithms)

1. Array search – accessible by numeric index
2. Binary (split) search – repeated dividing in the middle of sorted data
3. Tree search – data split into nodes (several types; quad, binary tree, balanced tree, complete tree)
4. Dictionary search – items stored in order eg alphabetically
5. Hash table search – type of dictionary with keys linked to an array
6. Inverted index – index of words contained in text data
7. Linked list – each item linked to next (eg disk data storage)
8. Distribution sort – data is sorted into intermediate structures
9. Linear search – each item checked in turn for match
10. String matching – find occurrences of a pattern