As you probably know if you’ve been trying out Office 2007 beta 2 yourself, there’s an updated engine of Microsoft’s Windows Desktop Search engine available for use with the beta, which enables better search functionality in Outlook and OneNote. This engine has been working fine for me in Outlook (well, after the initialization in the beginning, and if I skip the facts that the data files take up more than 1GB of space on my laptop and apparently need to be maintained regularly at the cost of a lot of HD traffic), but it never worked at all in OneNote. In the beginning I asked about this in the OneNote forum and I was told that the initialization had probably not finished (which was true, I guess), but several days have passed now and things still don’t work. I can search within single pages, but I can’t search across page borders — and the nice demo in the “getting started” section, where text in an image is supposed to be found, doesn’t work either.
For completeness’ sake: when searching across page borders (i.e. searching for something that can’t be found in the current page), the first time I hit Enter after entering the search word(s), nothing happens at all. The second time I hit Enter, this dialog pops up (for good measure, it pops up twice): !
Anyway, that wasn’t what I was going to write about. Two days ago I found that searching had stopped working in Outlook as well. Every time I tried it, I got a message (right inside the list panel in Outlook) saying “Outlook cannot perform your search.” Now I found what the problem was: apparently the Windows Search service had somehow hung itself up. It was running alright, I had checked that before — but after I restarted it (no, I had never rebooted my system since installing the beta) manually today, the search suddenly went back to normal. In Outlook, that is, OneNote still misbehaves in precisely the same way.