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Comment by MattPalmer1086 | Hacker News Reader

Haha, I'd be happy if outlook just integrated a search that actually works.

Most of outlook search results aren't even relevant, and it regularly misses things I know are there. Literally the most useless search I've ever had to use.

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Irony: they did. They bought LookOut, which was a simple and extremely good search plugin for desktop Outlook. And then, somehow, it was melted down into the rather weak beer search that 365 has today.

There is an alternative, Lookeen, which positions itself as LookOut's successor, but I've yet to try it.

https://lookeen.com/solutions/outlook-search/lookout-alterna...

I can vouch for Lookeen (circa 2012-2015). I set it up for 200+ users on Citrix and it worked great. I had the index for each user saved to their network share and yet the search was instant. It even indexed shared mailboxes. It barely used any CPU when doing background indexing.

It worked well with thin OSTs too but due to how Outlook and Exchange work, it would have to rebuild the index more often.

Definitely a blast from the past reading the word “Lookeen” but mostly good memories about it. I believe the ADMX integration was pretty decent too.

Don’t get me started on Outlook’s search. I can try to search for an email that’s only a few weeks old and somehow it won’t find it. It will, however, find emails that are from over a decade ago.

If they can't make an effective basic text search, I doubt they're going to manage an LLM integration that doesn't return straight up garbage.

Right, thats why they give openai gobs of money for their llm research

Most useless ever? You've used a Windows OS, right?

The fact that one chap's decade-old freeware[0] is 100x better search than the current native tool of a trillion-dollar technology corp is my proof that there is a god, and their name is Loki.

[0]https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

That’s exactly my thoughts. If search is broken, expecting LLMs to fix that sounds naive or just disingenious.

Thunderbird's is bad, too. GMail's is pretty good.

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