You fools, you own a gate to the internet. When i search 8*9 in the start menu, show me the result of the multiplication instead of a link to "search web for 8*9". Make the menu auto-complete with the titles of the first 5 web results instead of random ads. Make it work well as an actually useful extension of search. Forget about edge and bing.com, you will care about the brand name later. (You can thank me later with a sizeable compensation package)
Omnibox sucked until it reached a point where it didn't.
But microsoft is so focused on competing to google's product that they fail to realize they don't even need to go there.
With that said, we're talking about a company who can't even search properly for the installed app given the infinite resource of a modern computer and an app list below a hundred, so I don't want them to make the search menu/search any more of a disaster.
Start->Begin Typing->Wait 10 seconds as the menu hangs because it can't resolve some ad
Personally, if I want to use the web, I'll open a browser. That's not the role I have for my OS, I don't want. And if it does have that capability, providing an alternate search engine should be doable, and it should respect my default browser.
Microsoft system doesn't care if you're typing calc.exe or John Smith or 8x9 it will do the crappy web search, crappy app search, crappy store search, crappy calendar search, and vomit a mix of useless results in your face.
That's what makes it "hard" to do it right, and frankly something that microsoft just doesn't have in their dna (if they did, their start menu search wouldn't be so horrible). I think an OS that did it right would be improved, and I hope to hell and back that microsoft won't try it because they will never succeed at that.
Maybe there are external forces preventing them. Be it patents or even just the threat of being accused of anti-competitive practices again?
For me they just don't get search, like, the very idea of search or not just searching, it's understanding what you're searching for. And when you bring that down to the start menu, it become super clear and obvious that they're out of their league.
You might think "so what, it does work" but 99% of the issues in the start search are due to this offloading to bing that is not aware of your local computer and data.
As far as I can tell - it already does this. Now I hate how it works and it looks bad, but it does show web search results for what I type in the start menu.
And I will actually push back a bit on the start menu because I hate that the start menu searches the web. I want it to search my computer, I have a browser for web searches.
It'd be even better if it said "You need to consent to these 100 cookies for us to show you what 8*9 is".
Sure it's a massive generalization and doesn't always "work" but dammit it's a very good starting point. Much better than:
"How do we get the most money for a user ?"
Used to be, Firefox would show previously visited sites/pages (arranged by how often you visit them) first.
Now it loads Google search results first and I very often step into them like it's some dogshit on the ground.
but how is that going to increase the server hit rate directly tied to $employee (pardon, %EMPLOYEE%)'s annual wage increase ?
I was pretty sure it already did this...Just tried it again because you made me second guess myself and yup, sure enough, it already does this.
Wow.. at least show me I goofed up, you useless piece of software!