Outlook Search Problem

Question

I have Microsoft Office Home and Business 2021.

Whenever I try and do a search, I get a message "Search performance will be impacted becasue the Windows search service is turned off in elevated mode".

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Hi @John Simonich ，

Whenever I try and do a search, I get a message "Search performance will be impacted becasue the Windows search service is turned off in elevated mode".

Is this a recently occurred issue? Any changes were made to your office applications right before this error started to appear when trying to search?

Based on my experience, please try following the steps below and see if it can help:

1. Press Windows key + R, type services.msc and press Enter to open Services.
2. Scroll down to locate the Windows Search service, right click it and choose Properties.
3. Click the Log On tab, tick the checkbox of "Allow service to interact with desktop", click OK.
   
4. Restart Outlook and see the result.

Any update or questions, feel free to post back.

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Answer 2

Hi @John Simonich ,

Just wondering have had a chance try repairing or reinstalling Office 2021 and see the result? If you haven't, I think it's worth trying.

• Repair an Office application
• Reinstall Office 2021 on a PC

In case the Outlook search still doesn't work after the above attempts, I'd suggest configuring Outlook to use its built-in search via the steps below:
(Important: Follow the steps in this section carefully. Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Before you modify it, back up the registry for restoration in case problems occur.)

1. Press Windows + R, In the Open: box type regedit, and then choose OK to open the registry editor.
2. Find this subkey in the registry and then click it:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows
3. Select Edit > New > Key and name the new key Windows Search.
4. Choose the new Windows Search key. Select Edit > New > DWORD Value.
5. Type PreventIndexingOutlook for the name of the DWORD, and then press Enter.
6. Right-click PreventIndexingOutlook, and then choose Modify.
7. In the Value data box, type 1 to enable the registry entry, and then select OK.
   
8. Exit Registry Editor, and then restart Outlook.
   (After modifying this setting, you may see a message "Search performance will be impacted because a group policy has turned off the Windows Search service." when performing search within Outlook, this is an expected message which indicates the Windows Search service is not used)