Microsoft Promises To Fix Search With Major Windows 11 Overhaul (windowscentral.com) 105
Microsoft is overhauling Windows 11 search to prioritize local apps, files, and settings over web results while removing ads, promotions, MSN/Bing clutter, and other distractions. "You've have been asking for search that is faster, more relevant, and easier to use -- whether you're opening an app, finding a file, or changing a setting," Microsoft says in a new blog post. "Because the Windows Search Box is where many people start, we focused first on making results more dependable, easier to scan, and clearer before you click." Windows Central reports: The company is highlighting several key improvements, including clearer results that does a better job at showing why a search result is appearing when a query has been typed, alongside prioritizing local results before reaching out to the web.
Search is also getting better at handling things like typos, which should help surface the right results even when the user misspells an app or file. The search home pane will no longer show MSN or Bing content, and promotional content and ads will no longer appear in search results.
These upgrades are now rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Experimental Channel, and are expected to roll out to all Windows 11 users later this year. Insiders may not see the changes right away as they are rolling out in waves. The full list of changes can be found here.
Search is also getting better at handling things like typos, which should help surface the right results even when the user misspells an app or file. The search home pane will no longer show MSN or Bing content, and promotional content and ads will no longer appear in search results.
These upgrades are now rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Experimental Channel, and are expected to roll out to all Windows 11 users later this year. Insiders may not see the changes right away as they are rolling out in waves. The full list of changes can be found here.
I can't Wait! (Score:5, Funny)
Fix my bloody right click menu first (Score:1)
It shouldn't take 10 seconds for my right click menu to show up unless I hold down the shift key. And yeah there is a registry hack I can do but on my work PC it's a huge pain in the ass to have it put it in every freaking time I get an update because of course every time Windows 11 updates they clear the key...
I swear Windows 11 is the most user hostile piece of software I have ever used in my life and I have programmed on IBM mainframes...
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www.fark.com/politics
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The problem here is the loss of trust. I have migrated almost everything I used to still use Windows for (at work left Windows at home behind a long time ago), to either MacOS natively or a Linux VM.
Microsoft made the experience of using Windows 11 so bad it was worth it abandon workflows with a decade or more of use to avoid it!
The very idea the find/search feature on the desktop should have ever searched for, let alone returned results from the internet prior to those found on the local machine and maybe
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Microsoft made the experience of using Windows 11 so bad it was worth it abandon workflows with a decade or more of use to avoid it!
Speaking of workflows, on my W11 laptop, I have scripts for launching some programs that need launched in a particular sequence. Somehow an update changed the sequence and required everything be changed - didn't take much time to change, took time to troubleshoot though. Knocked out a USB trackpad, and where the hell did Bluetooth go? Changed the audio settings, more troubleshooting, more wasted time, more downtime.
I think the Einsteins at Microsoft actually came to understand they FUBAR'd, as the next
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The best part (Score:4, Funny)
Every windows licensee will be given a share in the Brooklyn bridge.
Uh huh (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: Uh huh (Score:2)
Have they tried to debloat?
Windows is just a glorified program loader.
Re: Uh huh (Score:4, Informative)
Have they tried to debloat?
Windows is just a glorified program loader.
And not even a good one. I have been struggling with W11's various issues, like reinstalling onedrive, placing programs on onedrive, which breaks them, it's abysmal audio issues, it's BOHICA updates, that destabilize the system even before installation, randomish program settings changes.
I even started to think "Maybe you're just getting old and losing your touch Olsoc you dotard old twatwaffle!" I mean, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft could put out this bad a product.
Then I tried an experiment. I dug out a W10 laptop that was sitting around, and installed the programs I was having problems with on W11.
And... they worked. Took 30 minutes to install and set up. Worked great - it wasn't me. And there is the undeniable fact that now that W10 isn't supported by Microsoft any more, that it is stable now.
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Make Win7 Great Again
For Insiders on the Experimental channel (Score:3)
Will any of this make it to real end users? Who knows, ad revenue is some real sticky goo that is hard to wipe off of your project once you have some on there and it tends to spread.
https://windowsforum.com/threa... [windowsforum.com]
Re:For Insiders on the Experimental channel (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why this is suspicious. Just how do they intend to make up for the revenue losses? What fresh hell will the next "update" do to us?
Yes, Windows is slowed down mightily by the constant telemetry feeds, the ad campaigns and sheer bad code sloth.
They are not benevolent, and so their intentions are entirely suspect.
Re: For Insiders on the Experimental channel (Score:2)
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Re:For Insiders on the Experimental channel (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For Insiders on the Experimental channel (Score:4, Interesting)
It means they'll fix it for the EU but won't do anything for the USA.
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It means they'll fix it for the EU but won't do anything for the USA.
I feel badly for you. When people can only post with one angle, it usually involves deep seated trauma. Have you considered therapy?
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It means they'll fix it for the EU but won't do anything for the USA.
I feel badly for you. When people can only post with one angle, it usually involves deep seated trauma. Have you considered therapy?
Gotta admit, 99 percent of his posts indicate a fixation on one single thing. And that is an actual issue for some people. The term "Psychological Fixation" is a rigid and persistent preoccupation with an idea, object, person, that resists changing even when it no longer serves any useful purpose. Ideation fixed on repeat, as it were. Not untrue sometimes, but consuming the mind of the sufferer.
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I don't believe that shit for a nanosecond. Spare me.
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The change to prioritize what you have installed over showing web content is a plus. I generally avoid using the search on the taskbar because I don't care about web content when I am doing a search for stuff already on my computer.
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Who knows, ad revenue is some real sticky goo that is hard to wipe off of your project once you have some on there and it tends to spread.
Microsoft has to pay their engineers who work on Windows somehow. As for me? I'm still on Windows 10 ESR and will be until October 2028.
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Microsoft has to pay their engineers who work on Windows somehow.
Yeah. It's not like it's a product that people buy or anything.
Re: For Insiders on the Experimental channel (Score:1)
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Then you have an entitlement for Windows 11 on your Microsoft account. Windows 11 licenses are something that you still absolutely have to buy [microsoft.com].
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flink beat me to the punch on explaining this, but Windows is, in fact, a product that people pay for. Microsoft's revenue for it was 17.3 billion dollars last year.
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Microsoft is panicking because Linux market share is increasing rapidly. Now that you can play a lot of games on Linux, AI bypasses the toxic community, and a lot of major media outlets are promoting switching to Linux as a way to de-shittify your computer, they need to take action or lose their dominant position.
Worse case scenario would be that people start buying computers with Linux pre-installed in large numbers, and their bread-and-butter OEM Windows licence revenue starts to decline. AI taking all th
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I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.
About frackin' time. (Score:2)
Users have only been asking for this since Vista...
Re:About frackin' time. (Score:4, Informative)
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Wait what? Search in Windows has always been totally borked - it didn't work on XP. That there are third party, my favorite is "Eveyrthing" https://www.voidtools.com/down... [voidtools.com] that do a so much better job should be an embarrassment to MS, but it seems not...
As long as you are in a situation that you can install and use it.
It shows how pathetic a product Windows is when you have to install outside applications to get raw basic functionality.
Re: About frackin' time. (Score:1)
Re:About frackin' time. (Score:5, Informative)
It already exists. https://www.voidtools.com/ [voidtools.com]
Returns results as fast as you type and can even index network drives. I’ve been using it daily for years.
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Near instantaneous searching across all your drives, including regex support.
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MS is probably not serous about actually doing this. Improving the user experience? That is not in character for them. What they want is "engagement", i.e. waste as much of your time as they can.
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Did they get rid of the spyware (Score:2)
Because it's the spyware that's the problem.
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If Microsoft got rid of the spyware in their products, they would not have anything left to ship.
Windows! The most widely distributed virus since 1995.
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Do you even need to ask?
Search Everything (Score:3)
Why bother, Search Everything already does a fantastic job. Microsoft couldn't create a usable search even if they wanted to. Windows search has been crap, well, since forever.
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Windows search used to be kind of OK. Never as good as Everything, but Everything didn't exist for most of history. But they really fucked it up somewhere along the line, which I didn't notice because I was using Everything, and now it's very challenging to construct a complex search without learning a whole new language of keywords.
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Why bother, Search Everything already does a fantastic job. Microsoft couldn't create a usable search even if they wanted to. Windows search has been crap, well, since forever.
No. It's been enshittified. If they rolled it back to how it worked in Windows 7 it would be a huge boost, especially in the start menu where I'm not interested in "searching everything" and more interested in searching for only things I'd normally expect in the start menu (settings, apps, and recent files).
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"User hostile" captures it nicely. Add their blatant incompetence and one wonders how they are in business at all. Must be some Stockholm-Syndrome thing.
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"User hostile" captures it nicely. Add their blatant incompetence and one wonders how they are in business at all. Must be some Stockholm-Syndrome thing.
Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
It is exactly Stockholm syndrome, with a sprinkle of not knowing just how stable other OS' are. The Linux classes I was teaching, after months of pickering around with Windows, ended early after all the students had things running problem free. Went through the syllabus at light speed, when the previous classes were a study in frustration, mostly figuring out what Windows update broke. They want to do more, so I have to figure out a new class.
If Microsoft can convince the
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Well, some people call what Microsoft does "great marketing". I call it "being a parasite that harms society". Tons of more of those, though.
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Translation: (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux is starting to eat our lunch and gamers are leaving our product for SteamOS in droves
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You'd think that, but we've heard this same line from Microsoft basically every other year since Vista was launched, and back then SteamOS didn't exist and Linux invoked an imager of badly dressed Johnny Lee Miller hacking the Gibson.
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Everything old is new again!
They've got a long way to go (Score:4, Funny)
Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to deshittify Windows. Can I help?"
It looks like you are trying to change the leop... (Score:2)
Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to change the leopard's spots. Can I help?"
For what it's worth, I rate yours as the funniest of the so-moderated jokes on the now-expired story. I have some additional thoughts on the topic, but as usual my timing and schedule these years has failed to mesh with the convenient transience of Slashdot. So I'll reduce it to a "Not really Microsoft's fault" attempt at a joke.
So what happened is that Adam Smith (as I understand or misunderstand him) was trying to explain how
Zorin or Mint? (Score:3)
I keep hearing things like "my grandmother got so confused, I set her up on Zorin/Mint and she couldn't tell the difference."
The more people just use their PC's to get on websites the less they seem to notice if they use Windows or Linux.
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You know that's a lie because apparently grandma is using a computer. I've yet to meet one of those.
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I meet them all the time. Most of them are in their 50s and have used computers their entire adult life.
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Also clearly a lie, we've heard that GenZ doesn't spit out kids, so grand parents can't possibly exist before their midlife crisis.
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You know that's a lie because apparently grandma is using a computer. I've yet to meet one of those.
I'm a grandpa and I'm using a computer. My wife is a grandma and she's using a computer, too.
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Yeah but you're a greybeard Slashdotter, hardly a representation of a normal person ;-)
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Yeah but you're a greybeard Slashdotter, hardly a representation of a normal person ;-)
Valid! (Including the gray and the beard, though my hair is still mostly black. Mostly.)
The point, though is that there are lots of grandmas with varying levels of computer knowledge, many of whom can and should be moved to a Linux system that is harder to screw up. Or, honestly even better, a good Chromebook.
On that topic, I did that for my father-in-law around 2010. I got tired of cleaning up the mess he made on his Windows laptop, so (with his permission) I upgraded him to Debian. It was hugely lo
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I keep hearing things like "my grandmother got so confused, I set her up on Zorin/Mint and she couldn't tell the difference."
The more people just use their PC's to get on websites the less they seem to notice if they use Windows or Linux.
I've done that, mostly during the time that Grandma had their machines loaded up with crap that they barely functioned. Thinking they needed to get a new machine. I loaded Linux Mint and they didn't look back.
AI is not enough. (Score:1)
I just had to kill and restart the search indexer (Score:2)
The index database had grown to 190 GB, with another temporary working storage file taking up another 50 GB. I had to stop the search service, delete the temp file, and rebuild the index.
And all that for a search that has never, ever worked.
Remember Google Desktop Search? (Score:3)
That's a search engine for Windows that actually worked. Too bad it was... https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]
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This one wasn't killed by Google as much as it was killed by users. Google Desktop Search suffered from the same problem that Windows Search does. It didn't index the desktop perfectly, it often nonsensically preferenced web content, and it was quite hap-hazard in how it returned searches depending on the tool used (e.g. it worked only for some email services.
Users who wanted a real proper functioning desktop search switched to Everything. Users who wanted a web search just reached for the search bar in the
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You and I remember Google Desktop Search very differently. It wasn't confusing at all, its results were very distinctly separated from web search results. I tried Everything and a few others. These tools tend to mindlessly find things, often requiring you to tweak configuration settings. But their relevance scoring tends to suck. Go ahead, try searching for "everything" in Everything, or common phrases, or misspelled words, see how well it works. In all these alternative search tools, you have to be very pr
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It wasn't terrible, but it was the enterprises who banned Google Desktop Search that killed the product because it was considered "spyware."
But, then, they still allow Microsoft Search, which eventually got the same "spyware" features as Google Desktop Search.
Few people even know you can search from Start (Score:2)
Click Start, start typing. When it works, it's the fastest way to start anything on Windows. But half the time, it shows you, for example, a web search result for "Control Panel" instead of showing you the...Control Panel.
Imagine... (Score:4, Insightful)
... if I didn't have to search for apps because the Start Menu wasn't a piece of junk that does everything possible to hide the apps I want to use.
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Less advertising (Score:3)
They are making it look more and more like macos. I doubt the people who run the company even use Microsoft windows.
my solution (Score:1)
I really just wanted local document searching and a working start button that was not broken with Internet content.
I purchased a MacBook Air just as the prices started to go up.
Wish me luck !
Take me back (Score:2)
Search hasn't worked in any useful way since XP.
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I wrote a file searching utility in C++ about 30 years ago. About 15 years ago I ported it to Python and found it to be faster than using the Windows directory enumeration APIs, and I've been using that ever since. It just searches filenames, but that's all I need.
Microsoft speaks! (Score:3)
The large print giveth; the small print taketh... (Score:3)
Probably means good news for users in the EU; same way they get left out of some of the most egregiously bullshit 'AI' stuff; may help EDU and enterprise; but I'm guessing that it's no promises for less favored users.
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"NOTE: Experiences vary by region." says to me that Microsoft doesn't even know what their changes will do.
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That's right, it randomly choses between the two.
Why do you hate yourself? (Score:2)
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You missed some use cases. For me, I'm knowledgeable enough to eliminate ads, telemetry, etc. (with the aid of some excellent 3rd party utilities), and I use some expensive audio hardware that only has Windows drivers, as well as the extensive ecosystem of audio apps that Linux can't match.
I could go to Mac, but both hardware and software are substantially more expensive, and I don't like the Apple walled garden. For me, a properly tweaked Windows is the best alternative.
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I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.
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Mac OS has more of
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Why anyone besides gamers still uses Windows is beyond me. As far as I can tell it only exists because of critical mass of the market share it got with business in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. People are used to it.
Not just that, for most people they will just use whatever came with their PC - just like most people won't look at the version of their in-car entertainment system in case upgrades are available, or Lineage OS for their mobile phone, or their ISP provided router.
Simply remove the crap nobody asked for (Score:2)
and fix known bugs. Search can some later. The "Backroom" panel that interrupts Save operations is an example. I want to see File Explorer and only File Explorer, not your damned Spam Panel!
Enterprises who banned Google Desktop Search (Score:2)
Remember when enterprises banned Google Desktop Search?
But, then, still allowed Microsoft Search, with the exact same remote privacy concerns that Google had?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Indexing is no longer needed (Score:2)
I wonder (Score:3)
At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.
I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.
I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.
Takes longer to De-Clap Windows than Install Linux (Score:2)
PowerToys Search (Score:3)
not before (Score:1)
we're talking about an OS that literally cannot remember what's currently installed on the system. search will happen when we replace this company as our OS czar.
Simple calculator or screw it (Score:2)
1) press windows, type name of app, press enter
2) press start, type basic equation (I.e 5/1.35), pray it gives me numbers and not an advertisement for feminine hygiene products
I am terrified when I need to use a mouse on the start menu. It's as though it can do everything except start programs
MS is bloated as company (Score:3)
These 'improvements' will get so many reviews, redesigns, input from different departments, that in the end they will fix nothing and you should be happy it didn't make things even worse.