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Say what you will about Microsoft Outlook, but I rely on it more than the telephone for work-related communication. I also use it to keep records–if you’ve ever sent me a message, it’s in my Outlook folders. Somewhere.

While I’m pretty good at organizing messages, I found something better: Lookout is a plug-in for Outlook that adds a search toolbar and a powerful search engine. It’s far faster than Outlook’s built-in search–to the point of being nearly instantaneous. It has a handy search toolbar and a background indexing system.

Lookout has a nice Google-style search syntax. You can type a keyword or two and get quick results, listed by rank, or you can use modifiers like +word and -word and specify dates, subjects, and other fields. I haven’t spent much time figuring out the syntax, since it usually finds what I’m looking for with keywords alone.

Lookout is free while it’s in beta, but I’ll gladly pay for it. I rarely used Outlook’s search feature, since I could usually find things faster by browsing through my semi-organized folders. By contrast, I’ve found myself using Lookout’s search several times a day, and it hasn’t failed yet. [Found via Marc’s Outlook]

I came back from the hectic SXSW Interactive a few days ago and have now caught up on sleep. I learned quite a bit from the panels and have some new ideas, some of which I’ll mention here in the near future.

It was also a rare chance to meet and talk with some people in the industry. Here’s a big list of nearly everyone I met: Jeremy Dunck, Simon Willison, Yvonne Adams, Nick Bradbury, Scott Johnson, Betsy Devine, Jonas Luster, Eric Meyer, Nick Finck, James Craig, Sam Ruby, George Kelly Jr., Matt Haughey, Anil Dash, Adam Keys, Alex Russell, Jason Fried, D. Keith Robinson, Mike Wasylik, Jason Calacanis, Brian Alvey, Rannie Turingan, Ryan Gantz, Matt Mullenweg, Molly Holzschlag, Tantek Çelik, Scott Andrew, Kevin Smokler, Anitra Pavka. I know I met at least a few others, and I apologize for this incomplete list. Let me know if I missed you.

As a newcomer to SXSW, I want to thank everyone who made me feel welcome and allowed me to participate in some inspiring, mind-broadening, and entertaining conversations and meals. I’ll definitely be there next year and hope to see all of you again.

Since Peter Rojas left Gawker Media’s Gizmodo to start the EnGadget weblog for Weblogs Inc, there has been some bad blood between the two. The other day I attended CEO Jason Calacanis’s presentation, Monetizing the Blogosphere, at SXSW, and he made several nods to this.

The most entertaining bit was when he said (paraphrasing) "I invited [Gawker’s] Nick Denton to sit on this panel with me, but he declined, so this bunny will be playing the part of Nick." He then conducted a rather comical dialog with the bunny. (See my photo at sxswblog)

The non-bunny parts of the presentation were very entertaining and informative, and all in all it left me with a very good impression about Weblogs Inc. I met Calacanis later, and he was surprisingly down-to-earth. I’m not as optimistic as he is about making money with weblogs, but I make enough money on Web advertising to find Nick Denton’s pessimism hard to believe.

I’m off to Austin to attend the SXSW Interactive conference later this week, and I’ve been looking over the list of panels for the show. It’s quite a line-up, I have at least two must-see panels for each block.

Some highlights: Blogging for Business with Nick Bradbury of Homesite and FeedDemon fame; Hi-fi Design with CSS with Douglas Bowman, Dave Shea, and Dan Cedarholm; and another CSS panel with Douglas Bowman and Eric Meyer.

There are some evening goings-on I may stop by, but being a nature nut, my biggest plan is to try to see the bats at Congress Avenue Bridge.

RankPulse has created something I wished for since the Google API was released: A site that polls Google on 1000 common search phrases, collects data daily, and provides some nice graphs. It’s good to see my quotations site at the top of one of their lists, and I have a feeling there are some great ideas for new sites buried in their database.

The list of keywords by number of results is particularly interesting. Who could have guessed there were far more results in Google for the words health and hotel than for the word computer? [via Searchblog]

Google has been beta-testing a new design for a month or so. Bookmarklet Guru Jesse Ruderman has created a bookmarklet that lets you see the new design. [via anil]

They didn’t change much, but one thing I notice is that the Directory link has disappeared from the front page. Are users really so search-oriented that Google thinks nobody will miss it?