Say I have 10000 + members in my database

Each member could have 0 - 10000 friends.

What is the best way to store this information
I can create a table called "friends"

Then when someone adds a friend, his and the friends name is added to the database.

Then I could do a sql search to find the user and his friends....

But when he has 200 friends, his name would be added to the database 200 times with a different friend in each row. I could return all these friends easily, but the problem is. I don't think it would be effective haven't the same user with a different friend listed 200 times.
It just doesn't seem like practical database design to me.

Can anyone give me some advice?

the method you have described (a table with 2 ids, the user and the friend) is the "best practice" design

yes, this will result in rows that look like this

100 212
100 331
100 352
100 756
200 175
200 823

but this is actually fully normalized and the simplest and most efficient way to do it

thank you alot!