can i tell outlook to search beginning with most recent

[Guest]

When trying to "find" an old email from a specific person, I want Outlook to
begin by looking at my most recent emails first and then moving on
chronologically. Is there a way I can do that?

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

No, you can't control it. Outlook 2007 handles it correctly.

 

[F.H. Muffman]

When trying to "find" an old email from a specific person, I want
Outlook to begin by looking at my most recent emails first and then
moving on chronologically. Is there a way I can do that?

The search algorithm's in Outlook should be optimized to find messages
already, and any sort of tweaking would probably just serve to break
optimization. I'm not sure what the algorithm does in terms of age of a
message, but, what is currently wrong with how it is doing it? Is it speed,
or just the order in which the resulting search is returned to you?

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

You don't use Outlook's Find much do you? It's not optimized at all - it
just searches - and unfortunately, it returns old messages in the search
results before new ones. Since most people use find to find something that
came recently, they have to wait because Outlook finds older messages first.
Because of this behavior, it seems to be a lot slower than it is.

FWIW, this is one of the top complaints in previous versions of Outlook and
one reason why the search engine was changed in Outlook 2007.

 

[F.H. Muffman]

You don't use Outlook's Find much do you? It's not optimized at all -
it just searches - and unfortunately, it returns old messages in the
search results before new ones. Since most people use find to find
something that came recently, they have to wait because Outlook finds
older messages first. Because of this behavior, it seems to be a lot
slower than it is.
FWIW, this is one of the top complaints in previous versions of
Outlook and one reason why the search engine was changed in Outlook
2007.

Ok, so I was using the term 'optimized' a bit judiciously =) I never really
paid attention to the order things were returned during the search. I've
never quite been impatient enough to sit and watch the window.

 

[Brian G]

Alleluia.

I am still using Outlook 2007 and searching was painful because it searched the oldest first (2004 in my case) and displayed the newest last. By unchecking the folders check boxes in Instant Search, results are displayed instantly with the most recent first.

What was the point of instant search?!