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1. Try to locate or discover, or try to establish the existence of
   "The police are searching for clues"; "They are searching for the missing man in the entire county";
   - seek, look for
    
2. Spend time trying to find
   "We searched all day and finally found the child in the forest";
   - look
    
3. Inquire into
   "He searched for information on his relatives on the web";
   - research, explore, delve into, dig into
    
4. Subject to a search
   "The police searched the suspect"; "We searched the whole house for the missing keys"

1. The activity of looking thoroughly in order to find something or someone
   - hunt, hunting
    
2. An investigation seeking answers
   "a thorough search of the ledgers revealed nothing"; "the outcome justified the search"
    
3. An operation that determines whether one or more of a set of items has a specified property
   "they wrote a program to do a table search";
   - lookup
    
4. The examination of alternative hypotheses
   "his search for a move that would avoid checkmate was unsuccessful"
    
5. Boarding and inspecting a ship on the high seas
   "right of search"

Derived forms: searches, searching, searched

See also: sought

Type of: activity, examination, examine, higher cognitive process, investigate, investigating, investigation, look into, operation, scrutiny, see

Encyclopedia: Search, Rescue and Survival School