The Smart Search Plugin that Turns Outlook on its Head

Lookout - Fast Intelligent Email Searching in Outlook

By Matt Stephens
March 21, 2004

Newsflash (July 16, 2004): Microsoft have bought Lookout Software, and the Lookout product is currently not available for download. This is potentially a good move, as (I hope) Lookout could soon become the default search tool in Outlook. Not sure if this will definitely happen though, as it looks as if future development will be tied into MSN. More thoughts here...

Searching Outlook is one of those tiresome, time-consuming chores that can grind your work to a halt. You suddenly find that you can't proceed because that one vital piece of information is buried away in a 6-month old email somewhere. So with heavy heart, you pull up Outlook's "dog-o-matic(TM)" search panel, type some text that you hope appeared in the email; and, as if by magic, twenty minutes later you find that there are over 300 matching emails, but not including the one you need!

Aside from being slow, another big problem is that Outlook uses a literal text search. If the text doesn't match precisely (to the nearest letter), you won't find what you're looking for. The way around this is to search for less, but then you end up matching half your inbox. So this approach doesn't help much if you're searching for a concept, or a vague memory of something that you sort of recall but can't remember the exact details. If only email searching was fast, and worked more like searching on the web - like, like… a Google search?

Enter Lookout. Lookout is a plugin for Outlook (do you see what they did there?) which promises to give you exactly that: an email search engine that works more like Google than Grep.

Installation: You need Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1. But if you don't have it, the Lookout installer offers to install it for you. So that's fine and dandy.

Once you've installed, you need to restart Outlook. Upon restarting, a "getting started" wizard pops up. This gives you the option of reading a few brief introductory screens and then starting the indexing; or starting the indexing straightaway. The introductory wizard bubbles with confidence in this product's abilities, and sets a good first impression.

Luckily, the indexing is nice and unobtrusive. It's performed in the background, and takes 20-30 minutes depending how clogged-up your inbox is. If you need to leave Outlook during that time, the indexing process will pick up from where it left off.

The indexing makes a big difference to the search: it is, simply, much faster than Outlook's own rather frustrating search tool.

Searches can be entered in a popup window that shows the results almost instantly, or in a text field that sits directly on Outlook's toolbar. Either way, it's convenient, and it doesn't do that stupid slooow "sliding out" animation that Outlook's search panel seems to do.

Lookout's query syntax is a lot like Google's. For example typing mars will find documents mentioning mars (so a basic keyword search). Typing mars +photos -rover will find documents mentioning mars and definitely mentioning photos, but not rover. You can also specify fields like to:, folder:, attachment: and so on; e.g. mars to:armstrong folder:nasa will find documents mentioning mars that were sent to armstrong, and which are in the nasa folder.

The range of fields at your disposal can make a search much more powerful. For example, using the modified: field you can search only for messages that were modified within certain date ranges. Handy fieldnames like modified:yesterday and modified:lastmonth mean you don't have to pop up your calendar to narrow the search down to a date range.

Combining lots of these fields into one search query means that your email search can be much more precise than would be possible using Outlook alone.

Searches are also suitably inexact. For example, I tried searching my inbox for have a heart, and found an email including the phrase "Damn their black hearts!" It also brought back 55 other emails. But it brought them back so quickly that I felt empowered to add an extra couple of search terms (+organ +transplant "black market" in this case) and simply narrow the search down. Doing the same thing in Outlook would just be too slow and painful. (The search that is, not the backstreet heart transplant!)

Because Outlook is so slow at searching, it's essentially a "do or die" operation - you have one shot at glory, and if you miss, it's game over. Enter your search query and go and make a cup of tea while it trawls your inbox, grinding your hard disk down to a smooth pebble. However with Lookout, the reverse is true. Searching becomes an interactive affair, with quick feedback allowing you to narrow the field until you find what you're looking for. It makes the iterative loop much smaller.

In some ways, the difference is like programming using EJB (in which the code-deploy-test cycle takes ages) and then doing something quickly in JSP. With a tight loop you can try, fail and try again much more often, in order to work your way towards your goal. In fact, Lookout could be described as "agile searching"...

Another big advantage is that Lookout is usable in all the right areas. For example, it remembers your search queries. When you relaunch Outlook, Lookout presents your recent search queries in a drop-down list. By contrast, Outlook's "Advanced Find" dialog gives you the option of saving your search options, but then it presents you with a "Save as…" dialog, forcing you to choose where to save it and what filename to give it. Who cares? Surely Outlook should worry about that on your behalf.

Outlook's Advanced Find dialog also contains some strange unrelated options. For example, you can choose the dialog's Tools.. Options menu and (amongst a multitude of other things) change your dial-up account settings. Focus, guys! (But I digress…)

When you compare the two products side-by-side like this, it really brings it home how clunky Outlook's UI design really is - and how well-designed and focussed Lookout is by comparison. If I were the sort of person that derived great joy from essentially unglamorous day-to-day tools, then searching with Lookout would definitely be a joyous experience.

At the time of writing, Lookout is in beta and can be downloaded for free. Go get it, try it for yourself, and give them lots of feedback. This is a smart product that deserves to do well!

Lookout can be found here [lookoutsoft.com]

Talkback: Have Your Say

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a new tool like Lookout
Pierre  
I heard of Lookeen
Ethan ethandowney@rocketmail.com

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