Abstract: The existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Einstein way back in 1916 but we are yet to detect these waves using terrestrial detectors. Much of the promise of gravitational wave astrophysics is in its potential as a novel probe of physics and astrophysics. By tracking and measuring the radiation from violent astrophysical events one may gain insights into complex physical processes that cannot be easily measured in other ways. The inspiral, merger and ringdown phases of binary black hole systems are expected to be one of the most important sources of gravitational radiation for detection by the terrestrial interferometric detectors. Inspiral and ringdown phases of the coalescence are best searched by matched filters using the analytically obtained waveforms. We cannot apply similar techniques for the merger phase, however, because of the lack of accurate waveforms for this phase. Instead we have to develop search methods which do not depend on the exact signal morphology. Excess power statistics are techniques which use only knowledge of duration and frequency band of the signal. The primary focus of this dissertation has been the search for binary black hole (BBH) merger signals preceded by inspiral waves. This search, which tries to combine the inspiral and merger phases of the binary black hole coalescence, is the first of its kind to be performed. This provides us an opportunity to test and enhance the coincidence criterion between the inspiral and merger phases. In the absence of accurate merger waveforms I have used the effective one body (EOB) [1] waveforms to interpret the results from this search. EOB waveforms estimate the gravitational waveform emitted throughout the inspiral, plunge and coalescence phases, combining techniques giving nonperturbative re-summed estimates of the damping and conservative parts of the two-body dynamics. In my analysis, I have used post-Newtonian templates (2PN) to detect the inspiral part of the waveform and the excess-power statistics for the plunge and merger phases.