I've experimented with different ways and there basically is NO good way to reliably find all of your friends through the search function or any other way.
If you have a reasonable low number of friends this may not be such an issue but I hover at around 5,000 all of the time even with removing deadbeat accounts.
Before I get into the only way I can figure to actually be sure I can see all of my friends, I'd like to note a few things I've found while searching on friend profiles looking for inactive accounts to remove.
First of all it has been fun and interesting to visit profiles that I rarely if ever do. Most of the time if I don't spot something on my own wall or on my home page as current then it misses my attention. I'm proud and honored to have so many fine people on my friend list. I believe I would enjoying actually knowing most if not all of them. It did my heart good to see such awake people, committed to sharing truth and who love freedom.
The top anomaly was coming across three profiles, all of which had rung a bell upon just seeing them in my friend list for some reason, to report that the member had died. I found a few profiles like that and it was very sobering. In this case though I don't know exactly what was the truth about them because every single one of them had the exact same message written on it - such as although not exactly quoted - "I am very sad to announce that my uncle, fill in name here, has passed away. I wanted to let his friends know as he really valued you all. There will be no further posts on this page." Add to the oddness, each of these were worded exactly the same on three profiles but also from three different profiles that put the comment in. So - three profiles dead, three profiles adding those same words to one of the dead profiles Hmmm.. I suspect puppet accounts killed off. Oh those spies are not so clever as they think they are.
Another interesting thing was to see on the one hand the diversity of people and interests and on the other the commonalities that my friends and I all seem to share across the lot of us and although we met up because of politics, the common interests cover a wider array of topics.
Back to the nightmare of finding all of my friends. I thought I was on to something by looking up names that start with any given two letters and going in alphabetical order should turn them all up. Such as typing in the search friends box "ab" should bring up anyone who has either a first middle or last name starting with those two letters. I was going along on this pretty well thinking I was reviewing all of my friends in alphabetical order.
Then I discovered that typing the first two letters will only bring up the top twenty of names starting with those two letters and unless you have less than twenty then you will never see all of your friends in the list that is returned. So I figured, okay, go for three letters even though the possibilities up themselves tremendously it seemed perhaps doable. However, then I found that for especially popular letter combinations found at the beginning of many names, that wasn't reliable either. For example, I tried to look up my friend here, Mark, and typing in Ma, or Mar did not bring him up. Only When I typed in Mark did he come up and I suppose if I had more than 20 friends named Mark out of 5,000 that then he might not have shown up even then because the site only returns 20 results.
So good luck if you have a lot of friends on Facebook and need to review them all. It appears you will need to type in up to any four letter combinations and possibly more in order to do it. PLEASE let me know if you know of a better way!
By the way, TeamNetworks.Net allows you to search all of your friends without limit and two or three letters is all you would need to enter!
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