Outlook horror stories
Published: 24 Sep 2004
I keep searching and searching…
Searching in Outlook is like a bad dream -- the one where you're trying to run and your feet keep moving, but you get nowhere. As one sufferer puts it, 'Whenever I try to search for messages in Outlook, the dreaded hourglass pops up, and I stare at it for minutes at a time--that is, if the blasted program doesn't crash altogether. What's the point of having a search feature if it takes so long?' Although Outlook gets a makeover and new features with every Office update, its sluggish search engine hasn't changed much. Outlook still physically scans each of your messages when you search. This is fine if you have only a few dozen messages in your Inbox. But let's not fool around: if like most people you have more than a thousand messages in your Outlook folders, you have a search nightmare on your hands.
Can this nightmare be banished? Try these ideas:
1. Divide your messages up into subdirectories
Once you've created subdirectories (lots of them) and siphoned all your messages from your Inbox, stop the global searches and restrict your searching to individual subdirectories. By cutting down on the number of messages Outlook needs to search, your search results will speed up dramatically.
2. Install a message indexer
Search engines like Yahoo and Google don't actually scour every page on the Web each time you plug in a search term; if they did, you'd grow cobwebs waiting for your results. Instead, these services continually scan millions of Web pages and create a massive index of their contents. When you perform a Google or Yahoo search, the lightning-fast results come courtesy of the index.
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