Searching Favourites - QFS & FSS Cove

If one surfs the Web, one may have hundreds or thousands of favourites if using Internet Explorer or bookmarks if using Netscape Navigator. Here are two freeware tools that may help one find a favourite. Both enable one to search for a favourite without browsing. The first, Quick Favorites Search searches on one PC, the other, Favourites Server Side, enable one to search a set of favourites from any computer that has Internet Web access.

I find both tools very useful. I would use one or both nearly every day.

Quick Favorites Search

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 the fact that, although one maintains a structured and sorted favorites folder, it's lots 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 is worth downloading and trying! The download is only 30 KB.

Quick Favorites Search was written by Kikerl and updated by Chris Harris.

Quick Favorites Search was updated April 2007. Auto detection of default Firefox bookmarks is now included. Two search terms can be entered. The last entered search term is shown in the Title bar. An About box is available.

Favourites Server Side & Favourites Server Side php

I wrote Favourites Server Side to enable one to search a set of Internet Explorer Favourites from any computer that has Internet Web access. The program searches for a string any where in the name and in the URL.

Copy file into this filename:

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

There are two versions of Favourites 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.

A demonstration of searching some favourites can be found here for the PHP version. Try searching for "quick" or part of the word. This is searching 174 favourites. I regularly use it for searching more than 3,000 favourites.

Return to directory after saving:

The download is only 4 or 8 KB.

(It should be noted that I have used the Australian spelling for favourites for my program and its description on this page.)

WinRAR is a shareware program that I have purchased and have found very useful. It is a powerful archiver and archive manager. RAR files can usually compress content 8 to 30 percent better than ZIP files. Main features are strong compression, processing of non-RAR archives, long filename support, self-extracting archives and more.

Any comments, suggestions or reports of bugs can be directed to qfs [(at) chris.id.au

chris.id.au