We propose a classical to quantum information encoding system using non--orthogonal states and apply it to the problem of searching an element in a quantum list. We show that the proposed encoding scheme leads to an exponential gain in terms of quantum resources and, in some cases, to an exponential gain in the number of runs of the protocol. In the case where the output of the search algorithm is a quantum state with some particular physical property, the searched state is found with a single query to the introduced oracle. If the obtained quantum state must be converted back to classical information, our protocol demands a number of repetitions that scales polynomially with the number of qubits required to encode a classical string.
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