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What idiot uses proprietary software with the expectation of privacy? Not to mention the fact that Microsoft is pretty up front about their extensive use of telemetry. If you're looking for an operating system which isn't expressly built to profit off of you and your data, try a Linux or BSD distribution.
What idiot uses proprietary software with the expectation of privacy? Not to mention the fact that Microsoft is pretty up front about their extensive use of telemetry. If you're looking for an operating system which isn't expressly built to profit off of you and your data, try a Linux or BSD distribution.
I've worked on some defense projects and navigation software for billion-dollar hardware. While at Microsoft I also worked on two system services that shipped with Windows 10.
Even I expect a certain amount of privacy when working on my personal workstations. Some of my work (team-effort intellectual property) produced while living in New York was sold to Microsoft for 24 million dollars around 2012.
Seems to me that it would make research and development uncomfortable for start-ups. Imagine having the ability to query all of the search terms performed on workstations for any R&D group in the world.
Does this mean that microsoft could be keeping copies of the meta data of every file on every windows computer on their servers and doing the search there?
This incident doesn't actually show any local files being sent to MS, however. Online search can be disable with a registry entry, which proves that the online service is not necessary for searching local files. It's far more likely that a connection error for the bing search is just triggering some bug that then prevents local results from being shown.
Of all the things I hate about Windows, unified search is the worst. If I want to search the web, I'll search the web--there's an app for that, the browser. Let me just search my hard drive, please. I didn't experience this bug, but if I had, I'd be furious that I couldn't search my own local files without somehow getting an internet service involved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The IE integration with Windows was to extinguish Netscape Navigator. So I'm guessing this move is probably to destroy chrome and indirectly google search. Microsoft used their OS monopoly to destroy Netscape. Not sure if it will work today since they don't dominate the smartphone space.
Or, maybe, document/file search is a pretty useful and commonly expected feature for a desktop operating system? And extending it to online search is an entirely natural next step? Even if this were a plot against Google, it would simply be bog-standard competition. It has absolutely none of the characteristics of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
They don't get to claim that it's a harder problem than indexing a hard disk without first explaining why they think they should retain the use of their fingers for continuing to send search terms over a network after I, as the owner of the hardware and 'owner' of the OS instance have made a concerted effort to turn that shit off.
The search behaves “as if” it’s using randomly-ordered keys in a random source dictionary, and it’s maddening. If I type what seems to be the same 3 letters a few times in a row, the result is always different: one time it acts like the app isn’t even installed, another time it finds the app (first choice), another time it finds some other random sub-component instead of the app with a weird file extension. Oh, and m…
Edit: and just to expand on a point the commenter made, the results would be more valuable if it prioritised in an order like this:
1) Something the user has pinned
2) Something the user has launched a bunch of times
3) The shortcut leads to an .exe that's likely to be the main program file
4) Anything else
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at how much the results change based on small changes to the input. Type three letters in a name and get a lot of things that aren't what you want. Type the fourth letter and the exact thing you're looking for jumps to the top. But if you add the fifth letter it goes away. I feel like it's trying to be too clever or, because it assumes the input is coming from voice recognition, it doesn't trust that what you ty…
Thanks to both of you for mentioning this. Every time I encounter this strange behavior in WIN10 -- I am so dumbstruck by it each time it still feels like it must have been a "glitch-in-the-matrix". I mean, because no one would really release software like that, would they? At least not a multi-billion software behemoth like MS? Right?
It happens because someone doesn't understand that search rankings vs. queries have to have a 'smooth' solution, and thinks they can tweak a few weightings here and there to get the results they think are 'correct' for the very specific cases they have in mind, without realising that this has a knock-on effect on the entire scoring space and you get odd singularities and stuff popping up as a result.
The people in question should not be touching anything even distantly related to a computer in any professional context.
The search behaves “as if” it’s using randomly-ordered keys in a random source dictionary, and it’s maddening. If I type what seems to be the same 3 letters a few times in a row, the result is always different: one time it acts like the app isn’t even installed, another time it finds the app (first choice), another time it finds some other random sub-component instead of the app with a weird file extension. Oh, and m…
Do you see the same issue when disconnected from the web?