Outlook and Email Search
I’ve been using Outlook for more than a decade and, over time, developed my own filing system for finding important emails. Mostly, I used specific folders for important topics like “Vircom” for our company stuff, “lawyers” for legal stuff and “R&D” for important items from our engineering team. I always presumed I could use Outlook search to find the remaining items in my Sent or Deleted Items folders. This was a very simple system, much simpler than the ones used by my more organized colleagues and friends.
The downside was that Outlook’s search was unreliable and slow (and in my opinion that’s still the case with Outlook 2010), and I still had to remember where I would most likely find what I was looking for.
Windows Desktop Search: nice try but… #FAIL
When Microsoft introduced Windows Search in Windows XP (some call it Windows Desktop Search, with a nod to Google), I saw its potential for finding emails and documents. But the XP implementation was still pretty slow and unreliable.
Vista’s version was much improved, but still there were items I couldn’t find easily.
Windows 7 Search: saying goodbye to Organize-by-Folders!
Then came Windows 7 along with what I consider my best computer upgrade in years: a solid state drive. Search in Windows 7 is almost instantaneous and I can find items easily. It works so well now that there’s really no need to file my emails in folders (remember when Gmail convinced us we didn’t need them anymore?). Although I’ll probably keep using some folders for quick reference purposes, I can do away with most. If there was an integrated way to add tags to email, I wouldn’t be using folders at all.
How about Gmail?
I also use a Gmail account for some of my contacts. You would expect that – Google being the ‘king of search’ – I would be as happy with its search capabilities as Windows’. But, for reasons I haven’t investigated fully yet, I’m having a hard time finding emails in Gmail. It might be related to the way I use the archive/delete/tag functions, or its indexing might not be as good as Windows Search.
Dreaming about universal search
My dream is to be able to use a single prompt, from any device, to search all my stored content from anywhere: from LinkedIn, Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Exchange, and (being a bit of a techn geek) what I have stored on multiple computers, some cloud locations and my Smartphone. I don’t know if there’s an answer to that dream yet: a very reliable and fast solution for finding items (speed is important to me, and probably to most of us). A cloud-based solution might be the best technical approach, but granting access to all my data from an external source raises privacy and security concerns.
But why stop at a single dream? I also dream of an easy, standardized method for applying tags to all my data and document types. That this tag function will work on any device I use to access data, within any application that lets me produce or receive data. That the search function will recognize these tags and later use them to help me find items.
Once both dreams come true, then my digital life will be flattened and it will be much easier for me to use the information I have to augment my reality.
The following article explains how to get fast and efficient Outlook searches using Windows Search (not the slow, builtin Outlook search)
Windows Search with Windows 7 and Outlook 2007
I just switched from Vista to 7. On both systems I have used outlook 2010. I find search on 7 much more sluggish! It also takes over 3 minutes to start (outlook)- fact is my pst is large but did not have that problem in vista….