Outlook 2010 Search Not Working or Indexing Fix

Your Outlook 2010 not indexing your emails anymore? Oulook Search stopped working? There’s something about Outlook 2010 search that gives you the feeling it’s not quite there, yet. Some Outlook versions relied on Windows Search, some depended on internal search, and so it leaves you wondering why is it that Microsoft can’t produce a solid search for something as important as email in one of the Office flag products.

If you search around the web, you’re likely to find thousands of threads on Microsoft related forums. Of all those threads, this is the solution that worked for me :

1. If you do this: Open Outlook click on File > Options > Search > Indexing options > Modify > Uncheck Outlook
   Click on OK then close and restart Outlook to check if search results fetch correctly.
   What you are using is the Outlook search that is not the Windows Search of Win7. In my case I already tried that.
2. the registry key: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search" does not exist on Win7 so this did not work.
3. And for the rest of the recommendations, believe I made a good research before post this, they did not work. And something to remark I do not believe that we need to rebuilt a system in order to fix an issue, since this is happening in several machines. I truly believe that someone of Microsoft should step in and take ownership of this issue, since as you could read there are several threads with the same situation without a real solution to this bug.

The problem is that the Outlook Search is the combination of Windows Search and Outlook 2010 and something is not working properly. (In some cases)

Yeah, sucks.

Other common solution :

• Outlook 2010 Mail Indexing Not Working (Windows Search Email Indexer Add-in cannot be enabled)

This simple one fixes most of the cases (source)

Turn Windows Indexing Service back on. (eh hemm… duh)

1. Control Panel >> Programs >> Programs and Features >> Turn Windows Features on or off

2. Tick (check mark) the Indexing Service check box and hit OK

Finally, when it comes to Outlook search, I strongly recommend just using a 3rd party solution. Google Desktop is free but showing signs it’s not going to be there for much longer. I personally use the free version of Xobni.