If one has many favorites, one could use “Quick Favorites Search” and Favorites Server Side. Both are available at http://chris.id.au, and both are FREE.

Quick Favorites Search (QFS) is a tiny Visual Basic program that fast searches on the “Favorites” directory for a string in the name (or in the URL) of your Internet’s shortcut files. It can also read Netscape Navigator and Opera bookmark files.

The program was written because of the fact that, although one maintains a structured and sorted favorites folder, it is much faster to search for a favorite than navigating the long structured favorites tree. If you have hundreds or thousands of favorites, try QFS! It’s worth downloading and trying! The download is only 30 KB. Quick Favorites Search was written by Kikerl and updated by Chris Harris.

Favorites Server Side was written by Chris Harris to enable one to search a set of Internet Explorer Favorites from any computer that has Internet Web access. The program searches for a string anywhere in the name and in the URL.

As the file searching activities are done on the server side, the amount of data to be downloaded from the Internet is minimized. This is particularly important if one has a large number of Favorites.

There are two versions of Favorites Server Side, one written in Active Server Script to run on Microsoft IIS and one written in PHP that will run on Apache or IIS if the server has PHP installed. The PHP version has the option of multiple search terms.

There is a demonstration at the Web site. The download is only 4 or 8 KB.