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If all you're missing is good indexed search, then install Lookout for Outlook.

It's a separate product for now, but MS purchased Lookout a while back, so it'll likely be integrated into Outlook 2007.

http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/download.html

It's basically google desktop for Outlook, its fast, and it works great.

Forget GDS. What you want is Lookout -- a free tool that indexes and searches Outlook PSTs in no time flat.

It actually makes Outlook almost usable! Which is saying something.

I agree, Lookout makes Outlook practically tolerable. In fact, Microsoft thought so much of the Lookout team that they bought the company and turned what used to be a for-pay product into a free download.

Additionally, many of the Lookout team are supposed to have worked on the new MSN Toolbar for Outlook, which is supposedly quite good (though I have not had a chance to try it myself yet).

When the product is important enough, the R&D is a minor cost. Either buy a startup that has developed the technology (example) or develop it in-house (example).

The real risk is that the products fails to take off after millions have been invested in marketing and product support. Thus, I would rephrase the above as "If someone else has already tested the market and there is sufficient demand for the product, why not join in to share the profits?"

http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/

"We are delighted to announce that Microsoft has acquired Lookout Software!"

BTW, Lookout works like a charm!

Have you heard of/used Lookout? It is a tool for indexing Outlook files (and is free). I tried out GDS, but reverted back to Lookout b/c Lookout can also index files on the file system that I specify, like I can say, "Index .cs files in this directory," and it will work, whereas GDS doesn't (yet?) support this. Google's UI is a lot nicer, but Lookout lets me get what I need done. Also, MS is supposedly going to be coming out with a Desktop Search of its own, which, since they bought Lookout, will hopefully be an improved version of Lookout.

Or integrated with MS Lookout which loks suspicously like Google Desktop

If, like me, you have Windows and Microsoft apps - especially Outlook - foisted on you, then take a look at Lookout. It'll index everything, including PDFs.

It's meant most specifically for Outlook users, but it will happily index files also. This makes Outlook go from a pain to something much more useful.

Integration with Google proper kicks butt.

Searching the browser cache is a fantastic idea

Its integration with Outlook is kludgly (launches Outlook Reply/Forward operations through HTML links) but impressive

Obviously GMail integration is going to happen RSN

So far, indexing is much, much slower than Lookout. And Lookout is much nicer in letting you choose Outlook folders to index (Lookout also does Office docs and PDFs as well, so this is a 1:1 comparison). Lookout uses the Lucene.NET open-source engine, BTW.

Specifying exclusion paths and URLs through a web interface is horrible. That's why there are file selectors you know, Google...

So far, I am very impressed and it's definitely worth a look, but it needs to integrate more with Outlook to change my day-to-day usage...

• It doesn't show the first few lines of an email, I have to open each one to see if that's the one I'm interested in. I'm hoping Google shows a small preview.
• You can't move emails around with Lookout. From the search interface it would be nice to be able to move/delete emails. I'm 99.9% certain Google won't allow for this either, though.

How would you compete against Microsoft?

First of all, there are tons of companies building and selling products that run on top of Windows that MS would love to compete with. Take Adobe or Macromedia for example. Microsoft's doesn't have any relations with the hardcore artistic or graphic community - they would be foolish to try competing against Adobe and Macromedia.

Another good example is Firefox. It has gained tremendous support by beating IE in almost all areas. Apart from being alot more friendly to the developers, Firefox is beating Microsoft in an area where they don't compete: standards adoption. And even IF Microsoft would try to compete in that area (as they surely will) we would *still* be winning.

How do you parlay your great idea into a successful business before Microsoft copies your idea, gives it away free with Windows, and chokes off the cash coming into your company?

Assume that you have a new terrific idea for a product to run on top of Windows. By the time you are caught on Microsoft's radar you would probably have a fairly large market share. Assuming your product isn't trivial, MS would rather buy you out (if only to get your customers) than try to build an equal product from scratch. If this happens (as has happened before) , it doesn't matter how much money MS have because your company will have all the money of venture capitalists and banks behind you (and even if you *don't* get support by external funding you would *still* be winning because being bought up by MS would make you a rich man).

This is interesting. Recently, while writing a chapter about Lucene ports for Lucene in Action, I came across Beagle. Beagle uses one of the Lucene ports (Lucene.Net - the same one used by Lookout, the Outlook search plugin, recently purchased by Microsoft). Since I know it is possible to perform 'more like this' queries with Lucene (I use it on Simpy - URL below), my guess is that Beagle will be able to form similar queries, too.

I wonder if KDE developers should use Lucene or one of its ports under the hood.

Links:
Lucene in Action
Beagle
Lookout
Simpy

If you're using Outlook, then I can't recommend the LookOut searching software enough. Searches gigantic mail folders in no time, and it's free (as in beer). You can find it here.

Get the program Lookout for AMAZINGlY fast searching in Outlook. It's unbelievably fast...

http://www.lookoutsoft.com/

One word: Lookout

Brian J. Mitchell
reflections of my imagination

Do you mean Lookout, that MS recently bought (available here),
Is based on the open source lucent.net

(somewhat OT, but you can't or shouldn't move your work email to gmail, so...)

For those of you who want powerful search of your 10000s of messages locked up in a work exchange server, try Lookout soft . I've used it with about 12000 messages on the exchange server and local outlook folders, and never had a search take more than 0.2 seconds. Still free while in beta mode.

Try Lookout for searching in Outlook.

I do find it kinda funny that Microsoft has all these information-at-your-fingertips, grand-unified, SQL-filesystem, Google-killer Search plans, but they haven't even got simple email searching going after all these years.

I guess that means that you guys didn't use Lookout, the single most useful plugin for Outlook. Since I'm forced to use it at work, at least Lookout makes it useful. Searching for old emails with Lookout is as easy as I can only assume GMail will be.

And I'm not even kidding.