Friday, October 12, 2007

Lookout email search relaunched via Google Desktop

Sadly, this is not a news headline - this is a fantasy of mine. Those who used Lookout email search remember how slick and intuitive it was and, like me, have an extremely hard time living without it since Microsoft bought it and scraped it. It is not entirely surprising that our (mine and presumably yours) friends at Microsoft would "buy and bury", they are pretty good at that. What is terribly surprising is that our friends at Google have not improved Google Desktop in any meaningful way. Searching for an email from sergy@gmail.com? Okay, you would think that using a syntax such as from:sergy or simply from sergy would yield results of emails from people with sergy in the email address wouldn't you? Not what you get. The yield (time benefit to society) on coding this is so great it is crazy. Emails are just one example. Mamma.com is owned by Copernic has a good set of display options for desktop search results like grouping by folder, time, etc. I have found the software to be a bit unstable and disruptive to my processing power - so much so that I exit the program each time I use it. This would be a fatal flaw if Google Desktop could match its features. My hope is that someone at Google reads this and gets inspired or leaves a comment that help is on its way. I do not expect the Lookout guys to come back to the market. Footnote: I tried Neo - it was not as good as Lookout.

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