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Comment by _pius | Hacker News Reader

Finally, someone else who feels this way! I've never understood why people praise the search in GMail so much.

Gmail search is fast. On outlook, a desktop mail client, it can take up to an hour to search for a simple term, in my experience.

It may be fast, but what you want is results.

I think some people also want timely results. I certainly do.

Ideally, yes, but that doesn't appear to be an option. Given the choice between instant and incomplete results, and slightly slower but complete results, I'll take the latter.

Considering the difference in speed, it's faster for me to find what I was looking for by sifting through GMail's results, than to wait for Outlook's results to show up at all. Outlook's search essentially renders my whole machine useless until it's done searching.

Have you used Outlook 2007 with the built-in search indexer? Incredibly quick.

I didn't know. I'm stuck using Outlook 2003 at work :(

Try Xobni search plugin - it's fast and free for the basic version. It will certainly alleviate your search pains with Outlook 2003.

If you're stuck on Outlook 2003, Lookout is an add-on for '03 that adds blazing fast search. I find it works faster than Xobni.

+1 for Lookout...free and works like a charm!

This whole thread (outlook 2003 being slow, 07 being a lot faster) makes it seem like xobni should have sold for 20mm

My favourite one is Lookeen! Lookout is old and cannot search for and in docx..xobni is a matter of tase, nothing for me!

So it sounds like you're using Outlook 2003 on XP and don't have Windows Search (what powers Outlook instant search) installed.

Hound your incompetent IT department and say you need to search your email and you need Windows Search 4 installed on your machine instead of blaming a 6 year old product and a 8 year old operating system.

I've been using Outlook 2007 since it launched. It is incredibly quick... when it works. I frequently find that I can be LOOKING AT THE EMAIL I WANT. Then type a phrase that I am staring at, and not have that email appear in the results. Never mind that sometimes it will randomly start taking 60 seconds or more to return results until you restart the program.

if I may quote some scripture:

"Gerald Weinberg tells the story of a programmer who was flown to Detroit to help debug a troubled program. The programmer worked with the team who had developed the program and concluded after several days that the situation was hopeless.

On the flight home, he mulled over the situation and realized what the problem was. By the end of the flight, he had an outline for the new code. He tested the code for several days and was about to return to Detroit when he got a telegram saying that the project was canceled because the program was impossible to write. He headed back to Detroit anyway and convinced the executives that the project could be completed.

Then he had to convince the project's original programmers. They listened to his presentation, and when he'd finished, the creator of the old system asked, "And how long does your program take?"

"That varies, but about ten seconds per input."

"Aha! But my program takes only one second per input." The veteran leaned back, satisfied that he'd stumped the upstart. The other programmers seemed to agree, but the new programmer wasn't intimidated."

"Yes, but your program doesn't work. If mine doesn't have to work, I can make it run instantly."

- _Code Complete_, pp.595-596

I love that story and have quoted it many times (though, Code Complete? really, just read Weinberg). But it doesn't apply here. Gmail search certainly works. It just doesn't have every feature.

Gmail search certainly works. It just doesn't have every feature.

It's not "completely broken," but no hits for a query of "zag" in an email that contains "zagg" comes uncomfortably close to "doesn't work." (FWIW, I use gmail and haven't had any huge problems with search, although I have had to do way more work to find something than I would expect given that it's from Google).

Code Complete? really, just read Weinberg

'twas just a quick copy and paste from my fortune file. Although as far as I'm concerned there ain't nothing wrong with Code Complete.

there ain't nothing wrong with Code Complete

It's ok but relatively mediocre, and in my observation usually indicates a programmer who hasn't sought out better sources.

in my observation usually indicates a programmer who hasn't sought out better sources.

Those being?

There are zillions, obviously. What do you want, a list? I don't know, SICP, CLRS, Knuth? Non-mainstream languages? Functional programming? For that matter, a single classic CS paper that wasn't assigned as homework? Code Complete, its grounding in software-engineering literature notwithstanding, isn't very deep.

I consider the lack of depth in Code Complete one of its great strength. You couldn't hand Knuth to a newbie programmer expect them to get anything useful out of it, whereas Code Complete will teach him a lot really useful things he can use his entire career.

If you've been working as a programmer for 12 years it probably won't teach you too many new things, but if you've been working for 12 weeks it is a great book.

I don't really have an opinion to state on the actual discussion at hand, but I figured I'd toss in an old link which contains what some of "those" might be:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...

Javier Kragen Sitaker's article/mail "My Evolution as a Programmer", recounts one coder's his growth as a programmer, career, and exposure to a variety of books throughout. It's really an excellent read, and contains some comparisons between a few good books - particularly Code Complete and The Pracice of Programming. I quote,

During this time, I read "The Practice of Programming", which is a lot like "Code Complete", but shorter and much higher in quality. I had read the same authors' "The Elements of Programming Style" back in 1995, on much the same subjects, but that book is nearly unreadable today --- it's written in PL/1 and FORTRAN IV. TPoP, aside from being written with modern programming languages, also contains insights from several decades more of the authors' experience.

-- The author in question is Brian Kernighan. Anyrate, I leave any interested person to go check the article out, if you haven't seen it already.

It's a bad sign when Jeff Atwood is your biggest proponent :/

I take solace in the fact that people actually read Code Complete - it's not just a bookshelf ornament. Yes, I know, Knuth is God, and his work is a masterpiece - the point is nobody actually reads the friggin thing.

In my experience, it's a more reliable heuristic to fault people for what they haven't read than for what they have read. Some of the smartest people I know can and do quote from childrens' books and anime.

He got a... telegram? Safe to assume this isn't a recent tale :)

(not that its age should detract anything of course, I just found the obvious historic reference amusing).

An hour, really? I don't use Outlook, so I don't know if that's right - but I suppose that's why the various Outlook search plugins are so popular.

I haven't had a problem with Gmail search as described, but I would not classify it as fast. Often I'll type in a simple query and have it spend 10-20 seconds before it returns results. If I perform the same query on the same dataset in Spotlight in Mac OS X, it starts to return results instantly with the search completing within 5-10.

My outlook box is pretty large and it never takes more than 3 or 4 seconds. It's not the greatest search either, but it does handle substrings nicely and automatically. It works most of the time (though I'd still be much happier if it worked all of the time.)

Gmail's search works well. Except when you need substring search or fuzzy search, in which case it absolutely sucks.

Most of the things in Gmail are done very well but non-exact search really needs improvement.

I love Gmail search because I've seen the difference - have you ever tried searching email in Mobile Me? It's like they ignore your query and search a random string.

Probably because most other email search sucks even worse. Frankly I think a lot of peoples threshold for saying something "sucks" is too low. Come on, it could be better, but it doesn't totally suck.

Reminds me of Louis C K's bit on Conan: http://videogum.com/archives/late-night/the-videogum-louis-c...

In my estimation, not being able to do substring searches in emails, sucks.

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