It covers the basics of Indexing in Outlook plus some details of Outlook specific indexing errors. Microsoft’s main recommendations are in this Knowledge Base article. And Microsoft’s excuses don’t make much sense when one of the possible problems is Hyper-V, another part of Windows! Microsoft’s solution Microsoft loves to blame third party programs for indexing troubles but the hard fact is that indexing should not fail so easily. The error handling is awful so tracking down the problem is too ‘hit and miss’ for anyone’s liking. But it’s not very robust and too many little things can make it fall over. When the Search Service works, fine, no problem. We’ve complained for years about the Indexing service, for example the lack of an easy ‘Index Now’ option to speed up initial indexing. “Near enough is good enough’ seems to be the Microsoft motto. It’s a core piece of Windows which was revamped some years ago, given the usual name change and now appears to have been ignored. This is the part of Windows which indexes the content of all the documents, images and other files on your computer, plus Outlook data, so that it can be searched quickly.

The trick to getting Outlook search working is to repair the Windows Search (WS). This index (like the index in a book) lets you find things much faster than scanning each file during individual searches. Whatever it’s called, the software sits in the background and creates an index of all the files and Outlook items. It was once called Windows Indexing Service or Windows Desktop Search. Windows Search is the current name for the indexing service. Once that’s done Outlook should be able to search itself quickly. You need to look at the Windows Search Service and get that working correctly. Outlook’s search relies on the Windows to find items. Usually, Outlook is to blame for a problem but not this time.

Here we’ll try to explain what’s happening, what Microsoft recommends and what might actually work. There’s many possible sources of the problem and therefore solutions.

Outlook always shows the ‘incomplete index’ error message above no matter how long you wait. Sometimes you might need to leave the computer on overnight so the indexing service can catch up.īut too often, the indexing never ends. Depending on the size of your hard drive and Outlook data, that can take many hours. Sometimes all you need to do is wait until indexing is complete. It’s great when it works but too often you get the dreaded “Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed”. More than a few people have problems with the Outlook ‘instant’ search feature.

Ms outlook not responding regularly