Core Web Solutions Blog

Caveat: I am not a pro with Microsoft stuff, so the following is a bit of an amateurish thing. But, its written for the regular user, not computer scientists. Read it for what its worth.

If you have upgraded from Office 2007 to Office 2010 with Windows 7 OS you may have noticed that your Outlook search isn’t working. You type in the name of an email sender you are looking for and ‘no results’. Well, after searching forums and blog posts around the Internet, I finally figured out the solution.

I am posting it here so that hopefully it will be come easy to find for people experiencing this problem.

Applies to: Windows 7 OS with upgrade of Office 2010 with Outlook from Office 2007 or 2003.

Problem Diagnosis: It appears that the dll file mssphtb.dll which was used for Windows Search Email Indexer in previous versions of Office, does not work.. or is simply uneccessary for Outlook 2010. I think the latter is the case. I honestly cannot find a straight answer to this, but I am guessing this is the case because the solution to make the email search work right leaves that dll add-in disabled. So I guess its not needed.

The main problem that seems to occur after upgrading from 2007 to outlook 2010 is that windows indexing service gets turned off. This probably occurs during the upgrade process for good reason, but the installation script does not turn it back on.  Again, this is observational analysis only, I have no concrete testing results, so take it for what its worth.

SOLUTION:

Turn Windows Indexing Service back on. (eh hemm… duh)

1. Control Panel >> Programs >> Programs and Features >> Turn Windows Features on or off

2. Tick (check mark) the Indexing Service check box and hit OK

Thats it.  You may want to restart your computer just for good measure.  Once you are back up, you will need to wait for a while for the indexing service to Index everything (many hours), but after a short time (half hour) you can check your email search bar and find that some of your email is now showing in the search results.

Hope it works for you!

Are you like me and keep a close eye on your new followers on Twitter? If you have been doing the Twitter thing for any amount of time, you should realize by now that many people follow you in order for you to follow them. That’s ok, nothing wrong with a little mutual backscratching.

There are essentially two results from this activity. You find your new follower interesting and decide to follow them too. Or, you don’t find them interesting (or worse, Twitter spam) and you decide not to follow; maybe even block them if they are nefarious.


Well, this all seems fine and dandy. But, wait… there is another result. A few days after you decide to follow your follower who initiated the relationship you find that they have already abandoned you. Why would they do this? Well, it could be that you got offensive in some way on your Tweets. But, if you have not said anything remotely offensive, why would they just leave? Easy, they were baiting you… like an angler (“fisherman” for the uninitiated). That’s right, its a little game called “catch and release”.

I guess it works for some people. You might catch people who don’t pay much attention to their followers. Or some may genuinely like that guy or gal’s tweets; so they stay. But I find it particularly disingenuous and phony. It says to me “Don’t Trust Me, I’m A Loser! Don’t Do Business With Me, I Can’t Be Trusted”.

So follow me if you like my Tweets, don’t follow me if you don’t; but don’t bait me, catch me and then release me. As my teenage kids would say, “that’s gay”.

So you need to completely destroy and remove your website and try not leave any traces behind. Well.. its not that easy to remove the pages from the search engines. But there is a way to speed up the process.

I had hard time finding a clear answer on this, but here is the solution I found that works.

This is for a typical Linux web server. I don’t know about IIS

***WARNING – This really does get rid of your website. So be sure you want to do this.

1. Backup your site (if you want to).

2. Completely delete all files from your web root. (via ftp or ssh) This includes any databases or applications like WordPress. If you have server access and the ability to terminate the account, do that. Then recreate a new account on the same domain with nothing on the web.

3.Create or update a robot.txt file with the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

4. Update your .htaccess file with the following

Redirect 410 /

(get rid of all else in the .htaccess).

5. Upload the robots.txt and .htaccess to the web server.

The result of this is that robots cannot index your site. There’s nothing there anyway but this tells them to go away and don’t come back. The 410 error is “GONE” – the resource is intentionally and permanently removed. This will speed up the process of search engines removing content from their index.

It may still take several weeks or months for your site to be gone… gone.. gone. But eventually, it will be.