Contacts and Instant Search

Complaints about Instant Search and Contacts keep surfacing:

"How do you search Contacts on fields other than the ones that are supported by default? If I expand the Instant Search box, it gives me a handful of common Contact fields, but there doesn't seem to be a way to add/get at a lot of the other Contact fields to search on, and apparently the indexer doesn't index the fields I'm interested in, like notes."

Find in older versions of Outlook had an option to include frequently used fields and the notes field was one of those fields. The basic Instant Search doesn't appear to search in the notes field at all. However, the problem isn't that Instant Search doesn't search those fields (it does), only that there is something wrong with the search index. In some cases, the only results that are returned belong to recently saved contacts. In other cases, you need to search All Contacts to get any results.

When problems like this surface, you need to rebuild the search index. To do this, go to the Control Panel, System and Maintenance category, Indexing Options. From the Indexing options dialog, choose Advanced, then Rebuild. This will rebuild the instant search index and should fix most search problems.

More Information

Because rebuilding the index is a slow process that may use a lot of your system resources, you can use Advanced Find (Ctrl+Shift+F) until you have time to let the index rebuild.

If you have contacts folders in different PSTs and don't want to include them in your search, you can remove them from the search by clicking on the arrow found on All Contacts Items and removing PSTs from the list.