After writing up the method for searching your Internet Explorer Favorites with Vista's built-in search engine, another one of our great forum users pointed out a freeware utility that will let you search your IE favorites right from within the browser itself.

This add-on is called DzSoft Favorites Search, and it's completely free, although it does have one glaring flaw: You can't open up your bookmarks in a new tab, which is something I do all the time. It also seems to be slightly clunky, but since it was originally written for IE 5.0, I guess that's not surprising.

Using the Search Panel

After installation, you'll have access to a new search panel on the left-hand side, which seemed to work well… you can search for a single keyword, multiple, or even the URL.

Show the Toolbar Button

In order to actually get access to that panel, you'll need to make sure that you can see the new button that gets added to the toolbar, but always seemed to be hidden in my testing. Right-click over the buttons and uncheck "Lock the Toolbars"…

Then drag the slider over until you can see the new Favorites Search button. If you still don't see it, use the Customize Command Bar option above and add the button to the toolbar.

You could also get to this bar by holding down the Alt key until you see the menu, and then going to View \ Explorer Bar \ DzSoft Favorites Search, but that's hardly a convenient way to turn it on, so I prefer the button.

There are also a number of options you can change in the drop-down menu:

For instance, the Create "Last Found Items" menu will actually add a folder to your Favorites showing the recently found items that you searched for:

So, if you are always puzzled how to search through your IE bookmarks, this is the add-on for you. Personally I'd stick with using the Vista Search method since it doesn't require any extra software, but this is a decent solution for those of you on XP.

Download DzSoft Favorites Search from dzsoft.com