Discrepancy Between Vista and Outlook 2007 Search Results

[Ahmed Mesbah]

Hello Group!

When searching for email using the search box at the bottom of the Vista
Start menu (or the separate Search Window), the results are always
incomplete. This does not occur when I use Outlook's Instant Search. Even
when using parameters like:

kind:mail Search Term

Email that I know exists does not show up in the Vista menu, but shows up
instantly when I use Outlook's Instant Search box. The indexing control
panel reports that indexing is complete, the number of indexed items looks
just about right, and I've always got Outlook running minimized to tray. Has
anybody else noticed this behavior?

My setup is: Vista SP1 with a clean install of Office 2007

Troubleshooting I've tried so far:

I've made sure that "Search Communications" is checked in the Start Menu
customization options
Outlook Search options are set to index both of my pst files and all items
in the Deleted items folder
Repairing Office 2007
Running Office Diagnostics
Running the Scanpst.exe utility
Rebuilding the index
Restoring indexing defaults, restarting and leaving the computer idle to
rebuild the index
Restarting the indexing service

The email certainly seems to be indexed, I'm just wondering why it doesn't
all show up in the Start Menu search results or the Vista Search window like
it does in Outlook Instant Search. Any ideas would be great appreciated.

Ahmed

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Outlook uses an SQL 'query' to search the profile *.PST file (a structured
database). The Windows index searches for 'text' within a file, another
thing all together.
I would imagine the same would be true for an Excel *.XLS or whatever, for
the same reason.

 

[Ahmed Mesbah]

Thanks for your reply, Mark. However, does that mean that on any Vista
machine, a search for email will always be incomplete or return no results
and that this behavior is by design? It sounds strange that Vista search
would be incapable of doing what even Windows Desktop Search on XP did.
What's the point of searching, if you're always second guessing the results?

Ahmed

message Outlook uses an SQL 'query' to search the profile *.PST file (a structured
database). The Windows index searches for 'text' within a file, another
thing all together.
I would imagine the same would be true for an Excel *.XLS or whatever, for
the same reason.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

The search feature in Windows Vista has been intentionally left with areas
that other search engines can use.

Overview of Windows Vista desktop search Changes in Windows Vista Service
Pack 1: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941946

You cannot find files when you search a Windows Vista-based computer even
though the files exist on the computer:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932989/en-us