In this post, I will demonstrate multiple methods to disable web search in start menu on Windows 11. You can use multiple methods such as Intune, Group Policy, Settings app, Registry, Command Prompt to turn off start menu web results and limit the search results to your local PC for a faster and better experience.
Windows 11 search is super useful and lets you find your apps, files, settings, help, and more on your PC. But it has one major problem. When you want to locate an important file on your PC using search, you are shown the Bing results from the web instead. This happens because Windows 11 tries to look for the file on your PC first and if it doesn’t locate it, the queries will be performed on the web and web results will be displayed.
The search and retrieval process is so quick that Windows 11 tends to provide results from both web and files on your local PC. The below image shows the example of Windows 11 Bing search results in the Start Menu. Typing “Prajwal Desai” in the search box includes multiple results from the web.
Most users don’t prefer to see the results from the web on their Windows start menu, and prefer to search the data within the local PC. If you disable bing search and properly index your files, Windows Search is actually very amazing.
There are two reasons for turning off start menu web search using in Windows 11/10. First, you avoid the unnecessary bing search results in the start menu. Second, you speed up your Start Menu by disabling Web Search.
Regardless of the reason, to get rid of bing searches in start menu on Windows 10 and Windows 11, I have covered multiple methods in this guide, and you can follow the one that suits you.
In my previous guide, I covered on hiding the search bar on the Windows 11 taskbar using Intune policy. The same guide also covers the steps to completely disable search in Windows 11.
Disable Web Search in Start Menu via Settings
The settings app in Windows 11 can be effectively used to turn off the web searching in the start menu. Open the Settings app on your Windows 11 device by pressing the Windows key + I or by searching for “Settings” in the Start menu. Navigate to Privacy & Security > Search Permissions. Turn off the toggles for both Microsoft account and Work or School account, as shown in the below screenshot.
Disable web results in windows search via Registry
Registry is one of the methods to disable web search recommendations from the start menu search bar. This method is tricky because it involves introducing changes to the registry. Therefore, you must back up the entire registry before using this method.
1. To begin, right-click Start and select Run. Type ‘regedit‘ and press Enter key. This will launch the registry editor.
2. In the registry editor, navigate to the following path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search.
3. Right-click anywhere in the right pane and select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value.
4. Enter the value name as ‘BingSearchEnabled‘ and set the Value data to 0. This will hide the bing web search results in the start menu.
Disable Windows Web Search Results Using Group Policy
You can create a GPO to turn off the start menu web search results for users on Windows devices. This method should be used when your Windows 11 devices are joined to Active Directory domain.
To create a new GPO, you can either log in to a domain controller or a member server installed with GPMC. You can also install the GPMC on Windows 11 and configure the group policies.
Launch Server Manager from the Start menu and select Tools > Group Policy Management Console. In the Group Policy Management console, expand the domain, right-click Group Policy Objects and select New. Enter the GPO name as “Disable Web Search in Start Menu” and click OK.
Right-click the GPO that you just created and select Edit. In the Group Policy Management Editor, navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search. Right-click for the policy setting “Don’t search the web or display web results in search” and select Edit.
Enable the ‘Don’t search the web or display web results in search‘ policy setting. Click Apply and OK. By applying this change, the queries won’t be performed on the web and web results won’t be shown to the user in search. Close the GPMC editor.
After the above group policy object is configured, link the GPO to an OU if you haven’t already. You can also link it to the domain, but doing so will make the GPO applicable to every computer in the domain, so it is not advised. The best approach is to choose a test OU, link your GPO, and test the policy settings.
Once the GPO is applied, you can use multiple ways to perform the group policy update on remote computers. On a test client machine, you can manually perform the group policy update by running the gpupdate /force command.
To test if the GPO has disabled web results in windows search, click start and type the text to search. The search results will exclude results from the web and will be limited to your files on PC.
Disable Web Search in Start Menu using Intune
For organizations that want to remove Bing web results from search across multiple Windows 11 devices, the Intune settings catalog is the preferred method. This is more effective because the applied policy settings cannot be changed by users.
Here’s how you can set up an Intune policy to disable web results in the start menu search on Windows 11 devices. Sign in to the Intune admin center. Go to Devices > Manage devices > Configuration > Create > New policy. Choose Windows 10 and later for the platform and Settings catalog for profile type.
Enter the policy name and add a brief description about the policy.
- Name: Disable web search in Start Menu
- Description: Disable Bing searches in Windows 11 Start menu
Click Next.
In the Settings picker window, type ‘do not use web results‘ in the search box and click Search. From the results, select the Search category. In the bottom section, select the following setting: Do not use web results. Close the Settings Picker.
Click the drop-down next to the Do Not Use Web Results setting, and you’ll find two options to choose from:
- Allowed: Queries will be performed on the web and web results will be displayed when a user performs a query in search.
- Not allowed. Queries won’t be performed on the web and web results won’t be displayed when a user performs a query in search.
Next to the setting “Do not use Web Results”, select the option “Not allowed. Queries won’t be performed on the web and web results won’t be displayed when a user performs a query in search”. This will permanently disable the web searches in the Start Menu on Windows devices. Click Next.
In the scope tags section, you specify scope tags. Specifying scope tags is optional, and you may skip this step. Click Next.
In the Assignments window, select the user groups to which you want to assign the policy. I recommend deploying the profile to a few test device groups first and then expanding it to more groups if the testing is successful. Select Next.
On the Review + Create page, review all the settings that you have configured for hiding the web search results from start menu via Intune and select Create.
After you create a configuration policy in Intune, a notification appears: “Policy created successfully.” This confirms that the policy has been created and is being applied to the groups we chose. The profile we created can be found in the configuration profiles section of the Intune admin center.
To speed up the policy assignments, select one of the methods to manually sync Intune policies on your Windows computers. This will ensure the devices get the latest policies from Microsoft Intune.
To monitor the policy assignments in Intune, go to Devices > Windows > Configuration and here select the Device Configuration Profile that you want to monitor. On the Policy overview page, check the device and user check-in status.
From the screenshot below, we see that policy assignments are successful on the devices and there are no errors observed. In some cases, the policy may fail to apply to certain devices. To resolve these issues, you will need to troubleshoot the issue by reviewing Intune logs on Windows computers. These are essential IME logs that are useful for troubleshooting app deployment failures on remote computers.
After the devices have received the policy settings via Intune, sign in to a Windows 11 device. Click start and type the file name or enter the text in the search bar. You’ll notice that web searches are completely disabled and the Windows displays no results found message.
Turn off start menu web search using CMD Prompt
On Windows 11, you can quickly turn off the web search results in start menu using the command prompt. Open the Command Prompt as Administrator and run the below command:
reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search" /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
If you want the web search results to appear in the start menu search, you can run the below command in the cmd prompt.
reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search" /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /fStill Need Help?
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