Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it Microsoft doesn't do things by halves. Not content with Teams taking the day off and Outlook labeling everything as spam, now Windows 10 Search has joined the cock-up club. The problem manifests itself by flinging up a large black box where search results should be on the Windows 10 desktop. Multiple flavours of Windows 10 are …
"Paint3D is an effing awful regression."
Well, you can uninstall it. And reclaim 16KB if Apps & features is to be believed. So what do you expect from a 16KB software package? OTOH, maybe it's a miracle of software engineering and that would be the justification to silently reinstall it on the next major update. Resistance is futile.
Thinking about it, maybe they should rename it to Pain 3D.
Surprise!
"All your base" belong to MICROSHAFT!
It's the #1 reason why I _HATE_ the 'search' "feature" on Win-10-nic - and why I don't really use it in 7, either.
For a better search : Install Cygwin, learn to use 'find' 'grep' and similar command line tools
[I have ALSO been disabling "index service" since XP, as a matter of course, because I do NOT want it eating up CPU and/or disk space to index things that I will *NEVER* search among]
hitting "the cloud" before the local system on searches is *SO* *WRONG* on *SO* many levels!
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Furthermore, keep in mind DDG is still US. And in full Huawei fashion, being a US company, they need to open up their data vaults if the Big Orange One™ develops an haemorrhoid. Call me silly, but that makes me skew more towards EU solutions, although I will admit immediately that nothing is full proof. Have been using Qwant lately, which is pretty decent. The missus uses SwissCows, which came with the package from our ISP (here in Switzerland). They seem to be pretty decent on the privacy front, but can't get used to their GUI.
Was on Startpage before, but they decided to join the Dark Side™
(https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/)
Thanks AC for the tip about Startpage, link below for anyone who can't be bothered to C+P:
https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/
I have been using Startpage for some time now as it gave better results than DDG. I think that's about to end very quickly! Shame on the Startpage founders+owners for selling out to a data harvesting Ad tech company.
The big difference I find is that while DDG usually honestly returns nothing if it can't find what you asked for, Gooooooogle returns loads of irrelevant stuff, most of which is listed above what you specifically asked for.
I have a horrid suspicion that there's some benefit to the G team in your clicking on things that are useless to you.
Reluctantly, our household has had no option but to continue using Google search because though tempted by the privacy claims made on behalf DDG, StartPage and others of similar ilk, tall have proved themselves long on piety but short on performance.
Repeatedly, search results from DDG and StartPage have been nothing like as comprehensive as those from Google, their inadequacy so serious that time and again references to stuff which turned out to be not merely relevant but particularly helpful have been entirely omitted.
One of these days someone, somewhere, is going to run a comparative test of the quantity/quality of search engine results by the Evil Google and the Saintly DDG and similarly noble StartPage. In the meantime, the myth will presumably continue to be perpetuated that DDG is in some way a credible alternative to Google when, in fact, it isn 't.
"One of these days someone, somewhere, is going to run a comparative test of the quantity/quality of search engine results by the Evil Google and the Saintly DDG and similarly noble StartPage. In the meantime, the myth will presumably continue to be perpetuated that DDG is in some way a credible alternative to Google when, in fact, it isn 't."
Err to say they're not credible is a bit much. Yes they're not as good as google right now, but for a lost of searching they're fine. I find DDG handles most of my general searching perfectly well, it's only when I want specific information, or a wide range of opinions that it comes up short. That's when I use google.
Oh and you have to remember to view more than the first page to get to some of the links, just like you had to do with google when they started up. If no one's clicking on the link, it's hard for them to increase the relevance.
Relevance? Try entering 'MG ZS – Why not to buy an MG ZS' not in quotes into DDG. 1st result is the relevant one. Enter same into Google. You will not see this page in the first Google results page. Instead you will see a long list of results on how to buy an MG or why you should buy one.
Google is a sales search engine, DDG is a privacy search engine.
Don't mistake quantity for quality. What I want is a search engine that finds the gems in the reams of ads and other dross in Google results.
That said, Google is usually better at finding stuff on Amazon than Amazon's own search. I suppose the only reason Amazon keeps the "don't know when it'll be available again" stuff on line is to poison Google results.
MS has been trying to make this the default for their searching for years. As a result, I gave up on their search tool years ago.
This is all part of their thrust to make your desktop little more than a dumb terminal and you do everything out on the internet.
I, for one is not going to play ball with that.
Vive Local Storage. At least it is mine and under my control and not subject to the madnesses of Redmond
I'm all for local storage, but unfortunately the Windows 10 EULA makes even your local storage Microsoft's domain. Microsoft can make whatever changes they like and you agree to let them and not interfere or try to prevent them from doing whatever they like. I, for one, won't ever play ball with that.
Indeed. I never even noticed there was a problem because Open (Classic) Shell Just Works. This is because there's no need for a desktop menu to connect Internet and die because it gets an unexpected reply back.
Prize for the first person to come up with a DNS hijacking thing which pwns Windows 10 machines via the search box.
"Time to learn new things rather than trying to go back to the way things were."
Why?
The principle of interfaces in IT is that they can change minimally if at all even if the implementation behind them changes. This is so that entities which use the interface can be unaffected. The alternative is that anyone writing programs that use whatever the interface provides (and if that whatever is popular there will be a lot more of them than those who wrote it) can get on with their own thing without having to keep running round in circles trying to keep up with others' whims. It's this simple idea that has made possible the huge success of the S/W industry.
The visual shell on Windows or any other desktop manager fills the same role between provider and user. Why is it that crayon chewers and marketing get to piss about with it at whim to the enormous cost in time and effort of relearning it, not to say suffering from the results when it turns out that more effort has gone into the interface changes than making sure that what implements it is on a sound basis?
BTW don't think this applies to Microsoft alone. They're all at it. Stability has gone downlhill since KDE 3 and I gave up on Gnome years ago.
Dinosaur here... I use Trinity Desktop (TDE), a fork of KDE 3.
What's ironic is that back in the day, while I liked KDE, I considered it too bloated. Now on today's hardware, by today's standards, this is the snappiest desktop (other than minimalist standalone window managers like fluxbox) I have. It takes minutes to compile nowadays vs. hours back then, too.
I grew very disenchanted with XFCE, it's no longer the light weight desktop it used to be when it was based on GTK+2. Blech.
Plasma 5 is visually nice, and feature rich but it's very messy with ridiculous dependencies and bloat, as well as making a horrible mess in the user's home. I'll never install that again. That's what got me to switch to Trinity, self contained in /opt/trinity and ~/.trinity.
I used it for a while. I worry that with very few resources to maintain it parts might be getting more antiquated than they should - I read somewhere about the network stack for example. I'd welcome your view on that.
KDE 4 isn't too bad and is the best fit on my little MSI. 5 OTOH has real problems of borking its desktop-appletsrc and scrambling the desktop layout so I have a script to back it up periodically & just restore it. It also has wierdnesses round autohide which would be intolerable on the small screen. 5.16 as exemplified in Neon looks a lot saner and the sooner it finds its way into De[bv][iu]an the better.
Combined with some judicious mixing and matching of bits of different themes and a decoration Theme called Reactionary makes the whole thing look and behave largely as things did about 20 years ago with a few genuine improvements picked up on the way. But fielding off those crayon-wavers requires some effort from time to time.
Hear Hear!!
I like to go on about how Windows XP was the greatest productivity booster in the history of IT. Simply because it lived for so long and there was no fundamental changes.... In the end everybody knew exactly how that thing worked and as a result people got to get shit done!
No, but I use the Start menu. You are supposed to be able to type the first letters of your program and be presented with the program menu item so you can click and launch. Today, nothing.
Or if you are asking "why would an internet search be coupled with a Start menu search", well, that's a fine question.
Sadly, it's the only option unless you want to scroll through the start menu looking for something and unless you know where to look (eg; Visual Studio is under 'V' but Teams is under 'M'). I don't need it at home but at work there are so many things I use that I have little choice.
Mind you the search is pants anyway. It often fails to find things or changes its mind in strange ways. I can't test now because it's borked but I think 'Not' shows 'Notepad++' as the first hit but 'Note' changes the first hit to 'Notepad'. 'Vis' finds 'Visual Studio' but 'Visu' finds nothing.
It's hard to believe that Microsoft could have made it worse but apparently they now have.
Despite being a mostly life-long Windows fan I have to say that Microsoft have made a right bog-hole of the Start menu ever since they tried to remove it.
> Sadly, it's the only option unless you want to scroll through the start menu looking for something
If you use a start menu replacement, then this isn't so painful. Personally, I find it faster and easier to use the (classic) start menu rather than typing in the program because unless the program is something I use a lot -- in which case I have it pinned on the start menu -- then I don't usually know the name of the program when I want to use it.
I don't think that I have ever looked for a program ( app ) any other way then thru the "start menu".
And I haven't had any desktop icons of them either in years.
But then I don't have a lot of useless crap on my computers either.
Not using the "start menu" ...
Huh, imagine that.
If you use a start menu replacement, then this isn't so painful.
Not an option in many large enterprise environments, where even getting a driver with an unexpired certificate blessed for installation takes more effort than the evacuation of Dunkirk.
Personally, I go back to Win 3.11 and NT 3.51, so the old ways still work. A folder of common shortcuts.
Well, that and in one case, a set of scripts to launch everything I typically use in the first few hours of the day, which took so many signatures that intelligence managed to miss the Russian cultural attache's signature on a US DoD modification request form. Entirely missed was a Chinese military attache's signature, as they've been in so long it's considered normal function now.
After all, a bug with seniority is a feature...
That's the way all the Linux GUIs I've used do it by default. Well, almost all. Back in my distro-hopping days I saw a lot of desktops. Liked most of them for some of their strengths, was mildly annoyed by some of their weaknesses (as I perceived both).
It stuns me that Win 10 does not search local files without Bing... does that mean that a Windows computer which is offline cannot search its own drive? I'd test it, but I'm on the road and my sad Win 10 box -- which is allowed Internet access once every three months or so for updates -- is at home.
It's hard to believe that Microsoft could have made it worse but apparently they now have."
They've not made it worse, they've "Enhanced your Windows Experience" by informing Microsoft about everything you run from the search box, as well as whatever files are important to you.
Has anyone run a sniffer to see what else is being sent with or after the query to Bing?
this calls for a mis-quote:
Look. I don't think it ought to be blasphemy, just saying 'Microsoft'.
Oooh! He said it again! Oooh!...
You're only making it worse for yourself!
Making it worse?! How could it be worse?! Microsoft! Microsoft! Microsoft!
Try this:
https://www.urtech.ca/2016/08/solved-video-how-to-hard-reset-or-remove-cortana-in-windows-10/
For me the search bar kept disappearing after typing about two letters and I use it a lot to open apps
Created a new user profile and the search bar worked fine
Did some heavy Googling and ended up deleting the Cortana package like in the Long Version of the above solution
I fixed this by installing the optional update KB4532695. Why the update is only optional when it is such a major issue, I am not entirely sure, but that's Microsoft for you.
Of course I take no responsibility if the optional update screws up your system even more, as it's Microsoft, but at least this office is working again.
Group Policy fix
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search
Do not allow web search Enabled
Don't search the web or display web results in Search Enabled
Don't search the web or display web results in Search over metered connections Enabled
A reboot is required.
I had just turned on windows subsystem for linux, installed a load of shells for ssh etc. None of which I really understand because I'm investigating and learning about it right now. Next thing I know the search box is broken, so then I'm rolling back the installs, re-indexing search, starting and stopping search services, only to find I didn't do a thing to it. I expect in turning on the windows feature it also took the opportunity to screw up my machine, hence they were slightly related, but it really was a massive time drain on my day with nothing that I can explain to the rest of the project team beyond a "dog ate my homework" explanation.
"Even when you do get results, they're poor at best."
Nope - generally better and not. Random search for Longbow... Bing - 4 out of the first 5 results ar information based, wikipedia, etc. Google: 3 out of 5 are for shops that sell longbow related stuff. DDG - 4 out of 5 are information. So bing is about as good as DDG.
Articles in El Reg cumulatively give the impression of Windows 10 being a botched job in which attempts at fixes and enhancements reveal further shortcomings. By this time almost any other consumer product would have people abandoning it in droves and demanding money back.
Microsoft's strength lies in the grip it has taken on private and corporate computing at desktop level. People and organisations are trapped. They must grin and bear Microsoft's ineptitude. Also its software is licensed (worthless documents anyway) such that attempts to recover money for lost productivity are futile; at least so for individuals and small business. Large concerns, private and public sector, have considerable muscle - even more when acting in concert - to hold Microsoft to account; this to be exercised through unused buying power and/or refusal to pay subscriptions in full rather than via litigation.
Anyone remember Netscape?
The legal wrangle started when Microsoft introduced "Explorer" which not only displayed the file system, but also the internet, thus obviating the need to use a third party browser. They claimed in court that it was 'part of the operating system'.
Call me cynical, but I think I see history repeating itself.
It'll have been the whole world effected minus a handful. If people are led to believe it is just them, then people are less likely to acknowledge what a huge house of cards their businesses depend on, and keep living in denial.
What a huge house of cards - Anticipating a global mega-fuckup of all fuckups, coming any day soon.
Had this crop up last night for me down under in Australia, but only on my laptop. I use it all the time there as its much quicker than using the trackpad, I can hit the windows key, type remo and hit enter, and I get remote desktop up. A full mouse makes it a touch quicker, but a couple of key presses still wins out.
I do applaud MS's ability to kill a desktop search from half way round the world though, us Australian's normally feel completely left out, so I feel special that we got included in something!
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I've used this Windows 8 came out and Microsoft went from the best start menu and search in Win7 and removed it all for tiles and awful search in Win8.
It uses a local search and the classic Win7 start menu and has some really good customisation options. It's only $5 which although is annoying to have buy something that should be standard or an option in the OS it's definitely worth all the time saved trying to use the default menu.
Overall I really like Win10 and I have used it since release but I do wish they'd go back or fix the start menu to make it useful again.
The windows 10 search is sometimes useful, but if it's routing every search through bing, that's a bad thing.
They appear to be trying to be like Spotlight for macOS, which does offer a similar system-wide and internet search combined. The difference being that Spotlight works fairly reliably, and if it does fail, can usually be fixed by deleting and rebuilding it's index (sudo mdutil -E / ) . Spotlight also doesn't require an active internet connection to search for stuff locally.
Spotlight isn't perfect (for instance, it seems to have issues finding some emails in Outlook on the Mac), but it does generally work without too much fuss, and can function if it can't talk to an external server.
I never knew because I do not use it, nor the menu, they are too weird. I wanted to reboot new PC, no obvious button, so added one.
Windows Key R is all you need.
mspaint
notepad
regedit
services.msc
shutdown /r
these work
Most importantly
CMD
Now I can use it
Find a file C: DIR name.ext /s /p
How easy is that?
Still trying to get open with working properly though, keeps on about a store.
Incredibly, it seems Windows 10 Search and other services were knocked offline by infrastructure falling over, preventing all search results, even local ones, from showing up on desktops. Yes, it's that stupid.
Yes it is but I can see why Microsoft are doing it. Gotta push the usage stats up for Bing so they can keep pretending that people use it.
I wonder what the biggest searches are? cmd, Windows up, word etc etc
...was to disable web search in the start menu.
No, wait.
1) disable Cortana
2) disable web search in start menu
3) delete all the tiles
It's still a useless POS though. Search worked great in Win 7.
In Win 10, lets say I search for "notepad". It should come up with two applications; Notepad (built-in) and Notepad++.
In fairness, it does come up with them both. but not at the same time!
not -> notepad++
note -> notepad
notep -> notepad++
notepa -> notepad++
notepad -> notepad
A search function that only returns one result arbitarilly is a bit useless.
Had this problem for a few days on my laptop, but not my desktop.
This is what I tried after everything I found on the internet didn't work: I added a new Windows 10 display language.
It did work, and then, switching back to the usual display language continued to work.
I would be very surprised to have done that experiment at the exact time Microsoft fixed its network problems, but what do I know.
How do Microsoft keep getting away with this nonsense?
Leaving aside the privacy aspect (every search you do goes to bing):
1. As the article says, why does a broken bing search also totally break local search? This is a real schoolboy error
2. Why can't Microsoft publish a fix for this, rather than rely on people to edit the registry themselves?
3. "We're reviewing our network redundancy options to find ways to prevent this problem from happening again." - really? How about reviewing their code and making sure it works. Nobody searches the web from the start button. It's a leftover piece of ridiculousness from the days of Ballmer, when he wanted everyone to use bing on their microsoft smartphones.
4. The upshot of all this is that because of a cut in fibre somewhere else in the world, I can't search my own computer. Microsoft really should ponder this and have a complete review of who they hire to write their code.
2. Why can't Microsoft publish a fix for this, rather than rely on people to edit the registry themselves?
Because Microsoft aren't stupid. They know as well as we do that every time they try to fix something several more things go wrong. Best to leave it broken -- it's called "stability".
For a long time now I have been using Agent Ransack or its newer iteration for Windows searches - speed, thoroughness and user friendliness make it a goo option rather than struggling to get a meaningful search result from Windows brain dead Explorer. Shame on Microsoft. I often think the soft stands for the brains of their managers.
Yup, Mr Samsung pink laptop borked good. I couldn't even get to Windows Update.
Incidentally it seems that one of the updates recently again broke Arduino with it not showing up at all in the VCP driver.
It also hosed SDR# as well but working again after another reboot from cold start with battery taken out
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