Lookout Below!
Anyone who’s used Outlook on a regular basis and has ever needed to locate an email among hundreds, even thousands of other messages knows it can be all but impossible and anything but quick.
Enter Lookout. 
Created by LookoutSoft, Lookout was the best thing to happen to Outlook. Using the built in search functionality of Outlook is horrendously slow, lags the entire system, and renders Outlook useless during the search. Not to mention that once the search is complete, one slight click of the mouse and the results are gone. Lookout did what MSN Desktop Search does, except Lookout did it well. My Outlook PST has over 20,000 items (including RSS feeds). Indexing the whole mess does take a bit of time initially, but once it’s done, say hello to lightening fast searches the likes of which MSN Desktop Search doesn’t even come close to.
I have been using this tool religiously at work and recently attempted installing it at home, only to find out it was not compatible with Office 2007. BUMMER!.
Nah, read on for the full review and tips on how to make Lookout work both with .NET 2.0 and Office 2007, both of which are known to cause problems.
This lovely little utility had a nice life, up through version 1.3.0.24057, after which Micro$oft came in and bought out the company (LookoutSoft). For a while, M$ kept Lookout available though no updates were released. After some time the LookoutSoft.com site began redirecting to the Desktop Search page within Microsoft.com, and Lookout was no more. After receiving many complaints, Micro$oft briefly made Lookout available once again for download. That however was short lived and it was pulled yet again.
If you are lucky, and have enough patience, you are still able to find Lookout here and there scattered across the web, though most links to this day point back to LookoutSoft.com. Try as they might, as long as we have the Way Back Machine, Lookout will live on forever. This page is the working last snapshot of LookoutSoft.com containing a valid stable download.
Micro$oft claims to have based Desktop Search on the Lookout code base, but for anyone who’s compared the two, they either used very little, or b0rk3d it the M$ way. Let’s have a little comparison shall we?
Using M$ integrated search, looking up the word ‘test’ in all mail folders caused Outlook to stop responding all together multiple times during the first 25 seconds. Eventually the results began to populate and 55 seconds later, the search completes.
Using Lookout, looking up the word ‘test’ in all mail folders caused a 1-2 second delay while the Lookout results window opened, followed by a total search time of 1.18 seconds.
55 seconds vs 3.18 seconds. You make the call. Whatever M$ took from Lookout, or did to Desktop Search, it was the wrong thing! To make matters worse, they effectively euthanized Lookout with the release of Office 2007. More on that later.
[UPDATE 4/1/2008] - While doing some more homework on Lookout, I discovered that it was built using the Lucene search engine library (.NET port project). Because Lucene is open source, Micro$oft would have been unable to include any part of it in their own commercial product. Remember, Lookout was freeware. M$ couldn’t use its technology, and their own was inferior compared to it. The alternative: Buy it and bury it.
Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s have a look at the options. Click the images below to view the full size.
| Fig 1 | Fig 2 | Fig 3 |
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In Fig 1 you can see where you would choose the folders you want to index. Lookout will do not only messages, but contacts, calendar entries, tasks, etc. The Add Outlook button is for adding Outlook folders. Consequently, the Add Files button is for adding actual file folders. Yes Lookout can also index your files! (and it still does it better than M$ Desktop Search). You are given basic control over indexing with vanilla options such as Index when Outlook is idle, intervals between fast / slow indexing, and the ability to set an indexing schedule.
The Advanced tab in Fig 3 also provides a slider to set the Indexer Aggressiveness. I run mine on the next to last tick on the aggressive side without any noticeable performance hits.On the Preferences tab (Fig 2) you can set whether or not to display Lookout in the System Tray. This is really only useful if you are using it to index files outside of Outlook. You can also opt to have a tool-tip appear when background indexing starts / stops.
There is an option to automatically check for new updates but this obviously does not function anymore though generates no errors if enabled.I’m not entirely sure if the Indexing group in Fig 2 actually affects the index creation or merely the search behavior. This of course does not include the included file types setting. The Name of default "Restrict" to use option can be used to set a default restriction. Keep reading to learn what exactly restrictions do.
That about does it for configuration. Using Lookout is as easy as typing into the Search box on the Outlook toolbar pictured at the beginning of this and hitting enter, and waiting a matter of seconds. A person could not ask for more search criteria to use. Clicking the lightening bolt next to the search box (on the actual results window, not the toolbar) will open the Lookout Search Builder. Its purpose is to assist building a valid search query using any available fields and conditions. Any field may be used, To, From, Body, etc. Additionally the search results can be constrained within a specified date range. The Restrict to drop down should be thought of like an Excel quick filter. For example, performing a search and selecting Has Attachments from the drop down will instantly filter the results to only those with attachments.
Lookout is perfectly usable even with the most basic of queries, yet has the ability to get quite complex. The syntax is somewhat similar to that of Google. You use + and - to force words to be present or not. Quotes are used to search for phrases. Adding a keyword such as yesterday to the end of the query will show only results from, you guessed it, yesterday. Those are pretty basic. On the more complex scale you can have queries such as "mars rover"~10. What this will do is return results containing mars and rover. The ~10 declares that the two words must occur within 10 words of each other. The query syntax is explained very nicely in the help file. Be sure to check it out and not just settle for the basic queries!
Lookout was a great tool, bounds ahead of the current state of M$ Desktop Search. Unfortunately it was cut off at the knees, presumably seen as a threat by Micro$oft, and with good reason. Desktop Search, in its 4th version, still does not hold a candle to the performance seen with Lookout.
Download Page - Courtesy of Archive.org
Okay so I know I said I’d cover the Office 2007 issue, this article has grown larger than I anticipated and for that reason this is going to be a separate post. Click here to go to the article.
-Vaelek
Filed under: Office, Productivity
