In this paper, two efficient codebook searching algorithms for vector quantization (VQ) are presented. The first fast search algorithm utilizes the compactness property of signal energy on transform domain and the geometrical relations between the input vector and every codevector to eliminate those codevectors that have no chance to be the closest codeword of the input vector. It achieves a full search equivalent performance. As compared with other fast methods of the same kind, this algorithm requires the fewest multiplications and the least total times of distortion measurements. Then, a suboptimal searching method, which sacrifices the reconstructed signal quality to speed up the search of nearest neighbor, is presented. This algorithm performs the search process on predefined small subcodebooks instead of the whole codebook for the closest codevector. Experimental results show that this method not only needs less CPU time to encode an image but also encounters less loss of reconstructed signal quality than tree-structured VQ does.