The AMR wideband speech codec was recently developed for high-quality wideband speech communications. Although it has an excellent performance due to expanded bandwidth of speech signal, it requires a huge amount of computation especially in codebook search. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an efficient codebook search method for AMR wideband codec. Starting from a poorly performing initial codevector, the proposed method enhances the performance of the codevector iteratively by exchanging the worst pulse in the codevector with a better one after evaluating the role of each pulse. Simulations show that the AMR wideband codec adopting the proposed codebook search method provides better performance with much less computational load than that using the standard method.