Lookeen Desktop Search (Standard Edition) Review

Desktop search tools like Axonic's Lookeen Desktop Search ($58 for the Standard Edition) were once a thriving category among utilities, but they haven't been as popular since Microsoft integrated search into Windows. But if you've built up a large store of data on your hard drive over the years, and you need to be able to find any random file or email quickly on a regular basis, a program like Lookeen or X1 Search, our Editors' Choice desktop search utility, can make your life easier. Instead of wasting hours maintaining a hierarchical folder structure for your emails, for example, you can leave everything you send in the Sent folder and put all incoming messages you keep in an Already Read folder, and let the program find what you need when you need it.

What Lookeen Works With
Lookeen actually comes in four versions: Lookeen Free, which Axonic calls a Home version, Standard (reviewed here), Business, and Enterprise, which Axonic refers to collectively as its Professional or Business versions. The key limitation for Lookeen Free is that it indexes and searches files only, with no support for email. However, all four share the same indexing and search features and all use the same program code. Once you've installed the program, you can upgrade at any point by buying a license for a more capable version and entering the new registration key.

Briefly, the Business version ($83 per seat) adds Group Policies to make installation on multiple workstations easier for an administrator. The Enterprise version ($116 per seat) also adds the ability to work with shared indexes on a team and the ability to work as a search client with Lookeen Server, which is a separate, enterprise-level indexing utility. For this review, I tested the features that all three Professional versions share.

For my tests, I installed Lookeen on a Windows 7 system. According to Axonic, it also works with Windows Vista, 8, 8.1, and 10. The company says it even works with XP, although it's not officially supported. The only email client it works with is Microsoft Outlook. And you need version 2003 or later. For my tests, I used Outlook 2007, with a local PST file. If you use Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or later, you can also the program with a local OST file or directly with your Exchange Server.

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Getting Started
Installing and setting up Lookeen is mostly straightforward, but harder than it could be because some choices aren't explained well. For example, you can install the program to work only as an Outlook plug-in (although it still indexes and finds files on your hard drive) or as a standalone program, so you can use it without starting Outlook first. However, there's nothing in any of the installation screens to tell you that, or tell you how to set it up one way or the other. Oversights like this made it take a little longer to get the program installed the way I wanted it. Fortunately, this is a one-time issue, and only a minor inconvenience.

In most ways, setup is simple. Download the file from Lookeen, and run it. The setup routine walks you through a short introduction to using the program, as well as setup screens that let you specify what to index, which would normally include your Outlook.pst file and your choice of drives or file folders. When you're finished, Lookeen will build the index in the background, indexing the full text of every file, email, and email attachment.

The length of indexing time depends on your PC's speed, how much there is to index, and the setting you choose for processing time. I left it at the default setting and didn't notice any effect on response time for writing in Word. You can also adjust the setting to a lower level if you need to, even while the program is actively indexing.

Various options let you set Lookeen for how often to index and whether to index in real time, as each file is created or each email is written or received. You can also add to or change the index targets any time you like, adding folders or drives or removing them from the indexing list.

One particularly important option if you archive your Outlook PST files—at the end of every year for example—but sometimes need to find emails from an earlier year, is the ability to add the archive files to the index. Adding them isn't as straightforward as it is with X1 Search, but once they're added, finding old email messages is just as easy as finding new ones.

Searching
You can call up the program by hitting Ctrl twice—or double-clicking the Lookeen icon in the Notification Area—and then typing in the search phrase, or you can type the phrase into the text box the program adds to Outlook, and then call up the program by hitting Enter.

Either way, Lookeen will quickly search the index and show a list of all hits, complete with a count of how many items it found. You can highlight individual results in the list and see the contents in a preview pane on the right side of the Lookeen window. Once you've found the item you want, you can double-click on it to open it with the program it is associated with.

If you turn up too many hits to conveniently browse through the results, you can use one or more of Lookeen's drop-down lists and text boxes to narrow the search, choosing to include Everything, for example, or just Mail, Attachments, Contacts, Notes, Appointments, or Files.

Other available filters change to match the type of item you're searching for. For Mail, in addition to searching through the full text of each message, you can specify search phrases for Subject, From, and To fields, among others. Similarly, for Files, you can use search phrases for Folder, File (meaning filename), and Path, as well as the full text. You can also customize the list of which fields to show as filters, and sort the list by field, simply by clicking on the field name.

Beyond these basics, Lookeen lets you build more complex search phrases, so searching for John -Smith in the From field, for example, will return a list of all emails from everyone named John except John Smith, searching for "John Smith" will return references to John Smith, but not John Q. Smith, and searching for "dog cat"~10 will return only items that include dog within 10 words of cat.

Unfortunately, I ran into some glitches in my tests. For example, after customizing the available fields to include File Extensions as a filter, the choice was gone when I turned the computer on the next day. Axonic says this is a known bug and expects to have it fixed in the next upgrade.

A more important issue is that Lookeen didn't always return results while it was running a scheduled re-index. However, this was apparently due to having run my tests on an older system with limited memory and slower speed by today's standards. Once I set the program to be less aggressive when indexing, the problem didn't show up again.

Conclusion
If you need a search tool that offers a bit more scope, you'll want to consider X1 Search, which makes it easier to include archive PST files in your searches, for example, and can also index and find items stored online in a Box account, in Microsoft SharePoint, and an assortment of Web-based email sites, including Gmail.