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Comment by boloust | Hacker News Reader

The worst thing about the Windows Start Menu search is that it changes the top result without any user input, and it feels like it happens almost every time I use Windows.

I'll type the first few characters of a program installed on the machine, and the top result is the program I want.

But just as I hit Enter, the top result switches out to a web search, so instead of the program I wanted to start, I'm staring at a page of useless Bing results.

Just infuriating, and makes me so glad that I'm using Rofi/Wofi, which never changes the results without user input, and responds to keypresses with no perceptible delay, even when searching across every file in my home directory (via fzf).

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It has been said that some companies that need to show positive stats will do this slight delay, because all the misclicks show that they are popular. This is why they are top, because everyone uses this feature with an artificial delay!

But that's surely just a conspiracy theory, no company would possibly manipulate their users because that's how you get promoted, or with stack ranking, not fired.

There is a registry key that turns off web search in win10, it makes it much nicer.

For posterity,

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

DisableSearchBoxSuggestions DWORD

Set its value to 1.

Should work for Windows 11 and 10

I don't see an Explorer folder under that path on my installation.

That's a Windows registry path, you can use regedit to edit the values. Microsoft has a reasonable guide for it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...

No, I know - thank you - but I mean there is no Explorer at that path in regedit for me.

Me, neither. The other one I see on Google is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search, and that doesn't exist either.

This happens to me every time I'm trying to open Notepad or Notepad++. I will type in "notepad" intending to open classic Windows notepad, see the top result I want, and then a new result will appear above it just as I hit enter.

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