Tested: Microsoft just debloated Windows 11 Search without Bing, and it's crazy fast

18 hours ago by sanitation to c/technology

Windows 11 build 26300.8697 hides a toggle to remove Bing from Search. We tested it hands-on: faster results, cleaner UI, local files first.
truthfultemporarily 123 points 17 hours ago

Only bad management is keeping everything from being crazy fast. No reason for today's programs to be slower than what we had a decade ago.

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Flower 18 points 11 hours ago

There's also a whole lot of abstraction layers in software these days. All kinds of frameworks, no code platforms, scripts and engines ask introduce their own delays when running software, all added to make time to market a bit shorter or just because of some tech fetish.

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ag10n -6 points 11 hours ago

Windows OS updates and releases aren’t subject to this as it’s closed source

Whether human or machine, external factors are all internally decided

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village604 8 points 10 hours ago

Why do you assume this can't be an issue in a closed source?

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ag10n -1 points 8 hours ago

Describe the abstraction layers of a closed source project in the context of Microsoft

You can’t, unless you work for Microsoft

There’s market forces, which is not what you described; rather tooling and nuance specific to software development

When Microsoft controls the input and outputs, it’s a closed loop affected by Microsoft governance, not random tools, systems or transparent inputs

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morto 3 points 9 hours ago

I remember when finishing my dissertation and thinking about how my sister did her one several years before me, in a computer that was considered unusable by the time I did mine, and both the work process and the finished result were pretty much the same. I had a computer that was astronomically better than she had, yet, everything was slow, just like she felt when she did her.

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dgriffith 5 points 8 hours ago

The CPU in an average consumer PC can do tens of billions of instructions per second now. 10,000,000,000+ instructions per second. And then it can also offload some work to other devices. Here, graphics card, deal with updating this display at 144Hz. Hey network card, take this buffer and squirt it out the ethernet port at a 1 gigabit line speed for me.

And even with all that help, it still takes for-fucking-ever to get shit done. What the fuck are all those instructions doing‽

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Mac 3 points 8 hours ago

Mine are all used up to block ads and trackers and page elements, then when they're done, I'm being throttled punitively by the service because i didn't watch their ads :(

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GalacticRobot -2 points 15 hours ago

I think many programmers and business models have given up on programs running 'fast' but rather they just running and shoving them out quickly. Add in all the AI programming, and I don't see it getting better. It's basically like most people when they earn more income. The more speed and memory a computer has, the more programmers will use of it.

A computer from the 80's starts up a million times faster than any modern computer.

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kandykarter 13 points 14 hours ago

That's nonsense. Every computer I own boots in under a minute. That was unheard of in the 90s, much less the 80s.

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atomicbocks 5 points 13 hours ago

Eehhh… this person is wrong about programmers and business models but DOS machines did boot really fast (my 486 boots to DOS in about 20 seconds) and C64s and Apple IIs and such were all ROM based and so booted instantly like a Super Nintendo.

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cenzorrll 1 point 4 hours ago

I put an ssd in a laptop from 2003, it boots to desktop on antix just as fast as my T14 running opensuse.

When this laptop was running XP spinning rust, it took 5 minutes to get to desktop, 10 minutes to do anything useful. SSDs have made that possible, pretty much nothing to do with anything else.

My dad had a C64 that I'd play around with, and I can confirm, it booted in seconds. Loading a program was a different matter.

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GalacticRobot -1 points 12 hours ago

You realize most computers in the 80's instantly booted right? Flip power switch and they booted to an internal rom. I'm sorry, are you fairly young?

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mabeledo 4 points 11 hours ago

Computers in the 80s took so long to load anything, I could go out, get some coffee, and come back before they finished, e.g. any Spectrum or Commodore would take 20 minutes to load stuff from the tape drive. Wyse network terminals would leave you hanging for ten minutes and then fail netbooting because some shit with the token ring network.

So, no, they didn’t “instantly boot”.

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binux -7 points 14 hours ago

Anecdotes ≠ proof

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scops 9 points 14 hours ago

Here is a 486 taking over three minutes to boot.

The person you replied to countered a broad generalization with an anecdote which probably matches the lived experience of most of us oldies who lived through the time. Your comment did not contribute to the conversation.

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SpaceNoodle 75 points 18 hours ago

Cool, now do that five years ago

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marud 35 points 18 hours ago

Cool, now bring back windows 7

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MrKoyun 1 point 3 hours ago

ive been trying to get windows 7 running on a modern laptop for, like, wayy too long now lol. haven't had much luck yet. the reason is, i think it'd be neat.

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Eternal192 37 points 16 hours ago

Microslop can still fuck off, too little too late.

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dabu 34 points 18 hours ago

If they want to push Bing so hard I wonder why didn't they just show you the local results first and then asynchronously load Bing suggestions in a separate section. It would make good UX while still promoting their search engine.

Good that it can be disabled though

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OhmeHose 13 points 17 hours ago

Because then you get no advertising moneyzzzz

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Zwuzelmaus 13 points 18 hours ago

Maybe the boss wanted the AI results to come first?

;-)

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corsicanguppy 2 points 13 hours ago

show you the local results first and then asynchronously load Bing suggestions in a separate section

Actually, that's fn brilliant.

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dgriffith 7 points 8 hours ago

It's not brilliant, it's something a software engineer should have mentioned in the first 5 minutes of the initial design meeting. It very likely was.

So what you need to understand is that mashing Bing and local results together was a deliberate design decision. Whether to artificially inflate Bing search numbers , or to get that sweet cash from sponsored results, who knows?

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Noja 2 points 9 hours ago

How do you expect them to maximise their profits if people find what they are looking for immediately?

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sylver_dragon 22 points 8 hours ago

Not surprising. Web search from the Start Menu was always a bad idea.

Hell, I've had to deal with users getting their systems compromised because of this idiocy. User typed 'ms teams' in the start menu, clicked on the first link and ended up at an attacker's page which mimicked the official Teams download page. User clicked "Download", received the trojaned .msi file and ran it.

Sure, there's some blame to go around in that case (and we finally got some default configuration changes out of it), but the fact that Microslop's greed led to a malvertising link showing up in a user's Start Menu is indicative of everything wrong with Windows 11.

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yesman 20 points 13 hours ago

One of the biggest Windows habits I've had to break is using file explorer to open documents and files. This was because memorizing file paths is way faster than using search. Search in Windows has never been good, because it's always been weighted toward what Microslop wants you to find. And the index goes to shit if a user does something unexpected like saving, moving, or deleting files.

Linux search just works. If I know the file name, there is no reason to open a file explorer at all. Just mash the power key and start typing.

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morto 7 points 9 hours ago

Instructions unclear. Now my pc is turned off.

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neclimdul 3 points 6 hours ago

Did you try to modify the sleep settings and put your computer to sleep again Elijah?

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Imgonnatrythis 6 points 11 hours ago

I use 'everything' by void tools for most file searching. It doesn't index content but I find files way faster and more reliabily than Windows search.

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TheparishofChigwell 3 points 8 hours ago

Everything for windows is hands down the most useful tool

I convinced our IT guy to index the company and host a server so now I can tell people where they stored shit even. In fact, it allows me to profile entire project lifespans and their respective evolution through our company.

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nevetsg 1 point 2 hours ago

Thank you for reminding me of Everything. It made me look awesome during a file discovery project at my last workplace.

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Anonymous_Leaker 13 points 16 hours ago

Oh, is it fast?.. I doubt it. Still background services sucking up all the ram.

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corsicanguppy 6 points 13 hours ago

background services sucking up all the ram.

I love how the (mandated) Teams running on the (mandated) win11 work laptop is gobbling A GIGABYTE AND A HALF OF RAM all by itself. What the actual flapping fuck is that?

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atomicbocks 4 points 12 hours ago

Teams, like a lot of MS products, uses Edge Webview 2 (an Electron clone). So if you have Teams, and VS Code, and Chrome or Edge running you are running 3 Chromium instances.

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radioactivefunguy 2 points 9 hours ago

on top of that, I'm pretty sure electron apps in the background can't be moved from RAM to Pagefile when they've been idle for a while . . . id imagine edge webview likely works the same

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Anonymous_Leaker 1 point 7 hours ago

Disabling start up items with system config helps.

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CheesyFox 13 points 10 hours ago

is it ripgrep level of "crazy fast" tho?

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IratePirate 13 points 17 hours ago

"We've listened to customer feedback and started putting REAL tomatoes into our Shitburger again. People will come flocking back in DROVES!"

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mrsilkworm 11 points 9 hours ago

too little, too late

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Evil_Shrubbery 7 points 16 hours ago

That's like them deliberately closing a strait (for profit), and then reopening it to much glory to their very achievement.

And they didn't even debloat telemetry, they just turned off the ads.

Also what local search these days isn't close to instant (which I would say it's faster than "crazy fast")?

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GalacticRobot 1 point 15 hours ago

Are there programs for Windows/Mac or Linux that make search of everything quick and instant? I can't think of any that don't involve pre-indexing or massively fail to find what you are looking for (or are slow).

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Evil_Shrubbery 2 points 14 hours ago

Oh, ... I got caught not reading the article, but I assume that goes for Microsoft as well - they do use indexing, right? Have since ever (but in those days you had to manually enable indexing, bcs slow HDDs at the time really bottlenecked)?

By "instant" I meant for indexed content (including installed things, etc). Idk, I don't search much locally, but if I need a txt file from Documents that how I get it (Linux tho).

Doesn't Spotlight on Macs work the same-ish or did they enshitify that too?

Edit: The article only says that they turned off Bing results (and added a toggle for the store)? That's just how Windows users using O&O experienced search this whole time, right?
I don't immediately see how this is different to eg KDE search functionality (also with added cools that I can do it in desktop, not having to click the search/start before).

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uninvitedguest 6 points 14 hours ago

I have done this (or had this done by IT) on every Windows 10/11 machine that I have had to use. There has long been a registry tweak to kill the online search and it really does improve the experience.

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TBi 3 points 14 hours ago

Please share the tweak

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uninvitedguest 9 points 14 hours ago path: 0 24379668 24379932 24380047, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0
LightDelaBlue 5 points 7 hours ago

irs remind me teh atrocious active desktop on win98. wen you DARED turn it on hooo buy the pc was slow.

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adhdsergio 1 point 6 hours ago

I liked it 😂

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ripcord 1 point 5 hours ago

It had a few good (or at least interesting) ideas for the time.

Also LOTS of bugs.

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CheesyFox 1 point 13 hours ago

is it ripgrep level of "crazy fast" tho?

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TheFrirish -1 points 16 hours ago

That's nice still never gonna use MicroSlop tools

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raspberriesareyummy -15 points 15 hours ago

Who gives a fuck? If you still use microslop, you are part of the problem.

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Imgonnatrythis 15 points 15 hours ago

It's nearly ubiquitous in the workplace. A lot of people don't have much of a choice.

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raspberriesareyummy -16 points 15 hours ago

Still, they are part of the problem. Not as big as their corporate IT or responsible manager, but still a part.

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thisbenzingring 7 points 13 hours ago

I see you are the type to throw the baby out with the bath water

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corsicanguppy 3 points 13 hours ago

I mean, maybe the baby didn't understand the movement, so --yeet!--

Skippy is trying to save the world, you know.

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TheDarkQuark 2 points 7 hours ago

What the fuck are they supposed to do? Burn down the company, and go homeless? As a Linux daily driver (both home and work; I'm just fortunate on the latter), you are making a really dumb argument.

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raspberriesareyummy -2 points 7 hours ago

You clearly do not understand the point I am making. It's not that hard to miss, so it's more likely that you just enjoy getting offended on behalf of people. Bad habit.

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corsicanguppy 10 points 13 hours ago

If you still use microslop, you are part of the problem.

Me getting paid - and therefore eating and paying rent - requires me to use the mandated OS on the company-provided gear. It's a great job, it has a great union retirement package that won't leave me destitute like my folks and anyone else who went through abject poverty, and in all I accept that trade-off while working to modernize us out of M$. So maybe moderate that crusade a bit before you enter the workforce?

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raspberriesareyummy -6 points 12 hours ago

You are reading a "I condemn you" where there isn't one into "you are part of the problem".

If I participate to an economy which exploits third world countries for quality of life and luxury, then even if I do not have a choice, I am part of the problem.

Becoming all defensive about it however suggests that you actually don't give a fuck about using an operating system operated by a fascist enabling corporation, while looking for excuses that it's "not your fault".

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Damage 7 points 11 hours ago

As someone who runs Linux on all of his own computers, you're part of many more problems. Grow up.

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