The Revit material editor window offers a search bar. This will work if the material you are looking for is properly named or at least in language you understand. Given that most users copy things over from other projects or even use stuff found in the internet, I would find it beneficial, if I could also enter colours (ie. R G B values, proper Pantone names etc.) or the names/descriptions of any medium used, into that search bar.
I often run into multiple materials coming from different Revit versions or localizations that are the same and only differ in naming but still use their own space in the list (no idea how they behave in memory).