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Comment by Zanni | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Apple has made this mistake about seven different times, the earliest being with Sherlock on OS9. Mixing local file search with Internet search solves no problem and causes chaos. The use cases for the two kinds of search are very different and users prefer using different tools for these jobs. Just stop doing this, Apple and Microsoft.

Totally agreed, and Spotlight does the same now on both macOS and iOS. I usually turn everything off in Spotlight except the file search, calculator and conversions. But overall it's still not nearly as bad as Windows'.

It's weirder with Apple. You can see why Microsoft might do it - it's not in the user's interest, but it is in Microsoft's interest to get more Bing usage. But for Apple, they hardly care how much I use Google.

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.

ShutUp10 lets you turn this on/off easily with a toggle, as with MANY other "features" of Windows 10 like all the telemetry:

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Thank you!

Ironically, last year Microsoft pushed out a broken patch that caused search to stop working unless you set the "BingSearchEnabled" key to 1.

All of this information is in the article.

Yes, that is why I posted the link.

I don’t know if I had this bug. Search on my desktop wasn’t working yesterday, but it almost never works right, so I /barely noticed anything was unusual/.

Good job, Microsoft.

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.

What is the alternative? Mac does the exact same with spotlight.

Spotlight search is 100% local unless "Spotlight Suggestions" is enabled. Even then, the search works exactly the same but is augmented with online content (like sports scores, weather, suggested websites, etc) where relevant.

I use FARR: https://www.donationcoder.com/software/mouser/popular-apps/f... (I assume in works in Windows 10, I'm still on Windows 7.

You can even install (and write your own) plugins for it, e.g. a calculator plugin.

Wox (Windows Omni eXecutor) "is a launcher for Windows that simply works", open source, plugins for searching other things

https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox

Spotlight is also blazingly fast

'sudo find / | grep <search term>' has always worked as local search for me.

there's also, you know, locate

I've actually had issues with locate finding things before. I haven't delved into it's docs, but on several occasions while searching for source code, libraries, etc, it hasn't turned up results that were obviously there. "sudo find /" only takes 3 or 4 seconds, and I get EVERYTHING. It's pretty perfect for me.

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