Go download Google Desktop at http://desktop.google.com/

It's Google for Outlook, AIM, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and web history (you can customize the search criteria, of course). The reason it's so cool is that it indexes everything for you ahead of time and requires no setup. You just double-click an icon to get a search page in your browser (or click a bookmark), then when you're wondering when your next meeting is for work you type in "meeting" and in a fraction of a second you get every email and text snippet with that word in it. Plus, when you search Google it automatically searches your local files on the fly (it's instananeous) and adds your own files into the search results (again, this can be turned off if you don't want it).

GD finds the exact email message I want out of my 13,949 messages (it has that little doucment number just like the web Google) in under half the time it takes Outlook to sort my inbox by someone's name. It's superb -- and bettter yet, it's free!

Microsoft is not going to be around long, guys. All the free software is better than their $300 bloatware these days.

 

One more thing I love -- in the results for email searches the attachments show in your browser with the emails. If you are trying to find a specific Word document from two months ago, but didn't save it to your hard drive (meaning that the Windows search can never see it), Google still indexes it and allows you to search through those files. When you get your results you click on the icon for the file and the app opens up that specific message through Outlook and lets you save the attachment or open it like normal. It's unbelievably cool. Microsoft should have done this 10 years ago...