Another great review by Paul Thurrott over on the Windows SuperSite: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/office2007_beta2_tr.asp . He's got some great information on Outlook and talks specifically about the new Instant Search functionality.

The U.S. government has recently expanded its search capabilities across many of its public-facing internet sites using technology from MSN that was previously Microsoft-only, allowing for a more "citizen-focused" information portal. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1915378,00.asp

Search before Outlook 12 Search in Outlook 2003 had many issues that prevented users from taking full advantage of it as a primary means of interacting with their mail data. The Find UI was not visible by default, and most users did not know how to turn it on. Those that turned it off were unable...

My fellow PM Ryan Gregg has a great blog about our new Outlook Object Model and all of the cool features you can tap into using our extensiblity architecture. One of those cool features is Search, and he has written an excellent post thats a primer on using Search's full content engine through the Object...

Our research and usability studies helped us determine where the bottlenecks where in the current search process for our users, and helped us focus our new design on a few key tenets. The first and most important is that of availability, where Outlook 12’s Search functionality is always available...

Over the next several posts I'm going to focus on explaining some of the methedology, user research, and design models that drove our implementation of Instant Search in Outlook 12. I'm going to start by briefly discussing the concept of information overload and some of the basic user scenarios we thought...