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Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

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Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#4

Post by whoopdedo »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #3

Windows 10 search is a weird beast anyways. Sometimes it finds things, sometimes it doesn’t. On my work machines it often doesn’t even find items from the start menu.

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 typed is actually what you "said". So instead of compensating for potentially mistyped queries it searches for results that are nearby in audible space.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#5

Post by Zanni »

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.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#6

Post by lentil_soup »

I don't understand. I don't want my start menu to search my files or the internet or be smart in any way, I just want it to show my installed programs or apps or whatever you want to call them. If I want to search my files I have a program for that, if I want to search the internet I open my browser. Why do we have to over complicate things! Who asked for this?

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#8

Post by taeric »

Zanni wrote: post #5

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.

Curious. This is also one of the touted nice things on chrome books, right?

I think I can agree. But the push by all browsers seems to be more search. Not less.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#9

Post by lsd5you »

lentil_soup wrote: post #6

I don't understand. I don't want my start menu to search my files or the internet or be smart in any way, I just want it to show my installed programs or apps or whatever you want to call them. If I want to search my files I have a program for that, if I want to search the internet I open my browser. Why do we have to over complicate things! Who asked for this?

Likely a rhetorical question, but they're trying trying to become the place where people go to look for things ... since apparently there is a massive amount of value (at least enough to risk the windows user experience) in controlling that entry point into search.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#10

Post by maest »

Zanni wrote: post #5

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.

I believe there is a way to disable bing search by setting some flags in the windows registry. I was affected by this bug, and the way to fix it was to disable online search.

There's a bunch of articles online on how to do it, eg:

https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/02/05/its-not-just-you-wi...

Basically have to set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\BingSearchEnabled to 0

and

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\CortanaConsent to 0

However, I agree with you, that I would've preferd this to be turned off by default. Extra dependencies that bring no extra value are net negative, as seen in there current case where a server-side problem stopped my local search from working.

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