Radio frequency identification technology is very popular in many aspects such as inventory management in retail industry, object tracking and identification, etc. In practice, searching for target tags is also a significant and emergent topic. Previous searching target tag protocols suffer low time-efficiency when the number of tags in the coverage area of local reader becomes larger or while the ratio of the nontarget tags in reader's region decreases. Thus, in order to improve low time-efficiency problem, this paper uses a new response signal encoded by Manchester technique with which we propose a new novel searching technique accordingly. Our proposed technique helps the reader distinguish if the tags in one area are target tags without receiving tag IDs. Further, in order to solve mapping collision problem, which two tags in the candidate target tag set map to the same filtering slot simultaneously, our study proposes a new improved solution called slot hopping, achieving one-to-one mapping between each candidate target tag and the corresponding slot. At the end of this paper, we make many simulations showing that our tag searching protocol is more time-efficient and accurate than previous tag searching protocols. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.