Turning Off Bing Search Suggestions


Turning Off Bing Search Suggestions

By Dave Taylor

The Question:Whenever I start to type in a file or app search on my Windows 8.1 laptop, all sorts of weird suggestions appear. I don’t like it. How can I turn them off?

Dave’s Answer:

I know exactly what you’re talking about with the search suggestions. It’s the same thing that Google and Bing do when you start typing in a search and it offers up popular searches that start with those words or contain those words. Sometimes it’s great — like on a mobile device where you can type “ymca hou” and it fills in “ymca hours overland park ks” because that’s your location — but other times it’s annoying and when it includes previous searches you’ve done, well, that can be downright annoying.

Historically Microsoft has had a really hard time nailing operating system search too, whether it was the mysterious Vista search system that couldn’t find files by name or by content (Google the problem, there are a million discussions from Vista users) or Windows 7 where the frequency of indexing new content could be so low that it also failed to help you find things. In Windows 8.1 I feel like Microsoft’s gotten very, very close and if search works at all, it works great. (I have had some Win8 systems where search simply couldn’t find anything, but a restart generally fixed it)

As you point out, though, a search in Windows 8.1 produces some curious suggestions too.

Let’s have a look-Article Continued Here

This post is excerpted with permission from Dave Taylor.

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