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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

The cleverest move was to integrate Cortana with local file and application search, which many users likely use as a universal command line/shortcut (hit windows key and just start typing). I find that when I disable Cortana, local search becomes severely degraded. If anyone has any tips on how to fix this, I'd appreciate them.

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The degradation is intentional. In Windows phone, speech to text and quiet hours doesn't work, and the accuracy of shape writing is significantly reduced, when Cortana is switched off.

Ms is trying to turn Cortana into the Google play services of Windows So they can consensually(forcefully) collect data from every windows device.

I'd guess that means speech to text and shape writing run at least partially on servers? Not hugely surprising but it seems really bizarre that quiet hours would need it. Probably some integration with cortanas contact database so that some people's messages come through? Even that seems incredibly lazy and ill thought out.

There's no need to guess, at least in the PC version of Windows 10 Microsoft explicitly says this is the case. No one should be surprised that this is the case for Windows, given that other speech/shape recognition is similarly degraded with cloud support turned off.

I suspect it is in part MS office politics.

Some years back Google went through a period of trying to hitch every new, and a bunch of existing, services to Google Plus.

It just so happens that the guy in charge of G+ was a former MS exec. And over at MS it was typical to attempt to hitch your project to any other project coming down the grapevine (the Google people actually called this "cookie licking" on stage after he had left the company).

And if you look back you could see this going on with .NET, you can see some semblance of this with Surface, and now with Cortana.

I guess it can be seen as some kind of in-office bandwagon politics.

Search Everything is super fast to search on Windows : https://www.voidtools.com/

I never use the "Windows Search" anymore, i hate it. It's slow and useless. I always disable the service. Then again, searching with standard windows search is probably my biggest annoyance on Windows

Do not use cortana for your local search but an alternative tool, I think locate32 has some issues with win10, maybe agent ransack[1] will do or voidtools' everything[2].

IIRC there were other tools: regain, lookeen, ...

[1]: https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack [2]: http://www.voidtools.com/

Really? Well that sucks considering if I go to turn Cortana on, Windows 10 says Cortana isn't available in my region.

I see apparently there are workarounds to get Cortana in all regions but most people aren't going to bother. If we're getting degraded local search because of where we live that seems pretty dumb.

What do you mean by "degraded"? Does anyone else have this problem?

I never noticed.

This works just as well in Windows7 (which doesn't have Cortana). Just hit the Windows key and start typing.

It's gone downhill since. Windows 8/10 search is virtually useless compared to Windows 7.

I use the utility "Everything" for instant search on Windows, works pretty well.

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