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Microsoft To Unify Search Across Windows 10, Office 365 and Bing with Microsoft Search (zdnet.com)
Microsoft has a new 'North Star' for search: One, unified, smart search box that will span Windows, Office, Bing and more. From a report: For the past several years, Microsoft been working to unify and personalize its search experience across Office 365. But now the company is going a step further and bringing Windows 10 the same search experience. At Ignite last year, Microsoft said its holy grail for search was to enable people to search from wherever they were without interrupting their workflow. Bing for Business -- a way to turn Bing into an Intranet search service -- also debuted last year. At this year's Ignite, Microsoft is refining and expanding that search mission. Microsoft's plan is to put the search box "in a consistent, prominent place across Edge, Bing, Windows and Office apps, so that search is always one click away." The company also is "supercharging" the search box so that users can more easily find people, related content, commands for apps and more before they actually start typing in the search box, as it will be contextually aware and offer proactive search results and suggestions. Today, September 24, Microsoft is starting to roll out a preview of this Microsoft Search feature to Office.com, Bing.com (where it's no longer called Bing for Business, but, instead Microsoft Search in Bing) and the SharePoint Mobile app. Microsoft Search will be coming to Edge, Windows and other versions of Office in the coming months, going into 2019.
The inevitable first question that emerges whenever such a feature gets announced:
How do you disable it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wow. And maybe after this, they can finally figure out how to make a decent search function for Outlook.
It doesn't matter what feature they roll out, Microsoft has proven itself amazingly untrustworthy. Even if they disabled Telemetry and gave all of us back "our" PCs and devices (And stolen data), it would still be a long time before they could be trusted.
Microsoft needs to stop forcing telemetry down everyone's throat, stop stealing peoples data, making you sign in for a freaking Office product and do the right thing.
Pretty sure the feature creep has completely gotten outta hand when you need a search bar to find one.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
With Chrome "integrating" their logins and Bing integrating their search into office and Edge, poor Mozilla is stuck in the middle creek without an XUL paddle.
Can't they make it find content before looking for related content? Because the Windows 10 search function is just awful. "Broken" is not an unfair description when it refuses to find installed programs or files with the name typed exactly.
Learning to use Linux as a daily driver on my laptop has been a bit painful but it's nothing compared to my experiences with Win10.
Didn't they already pay something like half a billion to EU for the IE debacle? Do they really want to repeat that?
Has the search in Windows as a whole been overhauled now? Because in current Windows 10 iterations it's nearly useless in our business setting. My "favorite" loss of functionality was the ability to search mail from Windows search. My userbase just loved it.
Sounds like Microsoft is reinventing Google Desktop (a fine product that should never have been killed)
Microsoft is going full on Sauron. One Bing to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. So the question remains, which volcano do we have to throw them into?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Searching is an interruption in one's workflow. Instead of allowing people to go directly where they want to go, Microsoft keeps trying to force search down people's throats by claiming it's a better "experience".
Question: if one went to the store for eggs, do you walk around the entire store "searching" for eggs, or do you go directly to where eggs are located?
As I have said many times, with each iteration of Windows Microsoft has made it more difficult for an end user to accomplish something. Things which used to be readily available are buried or moved to obscure locations. When you do find what you're looking for, the steps to complete the task have soared.
This is why, except for work, I will not use Windows 10. It's an abomination whose inept design will cause a myriad of bad habits to be the norm and cause a regression in accomplishing tasks easily.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I know I'm not the only one, please chime in if the same thing happens to you:
1) Click on Win10 start menu .....
2) Wait
3) Wait some more...
4)
5) Watch little lemmings cobble together a start menu tile by tile
6) Type something to start searching your PC
7) Wait....
8) Listen to your HDD churn like it's the little engine that could going up a steep incline as Win10 tries to find things on your computer, the web, etc.
9) Curse the dead bloated seal that is Windows 10
10) Give up with frustration and open 'This PC' and manually search for something
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I haven't been able to reliably searching in windows file explorer since windows xp.
Anybody remember "web desktop"?
"Network places"?
Stop trying to blur the lines between my local PC and some networked location out there. I want to know where something I am interacting with is. For security if nothing else.
From TFS: [...] "Microsoft's plan is to put the search box "in a consistent, prominent place across Edge, Bing, Windows and Office apps, so that search is always one click away."" [...] They should do like Apple did with Spotlight. Hit the keyboard shortcut, and the goddamn search box appears right smack in the middle of the display, unmoveable, with no options to place it elsewhere, out of the fuckin' way. Fuck Apple.
I didn't like it when Ubuntu integrated Amazon searches into their launcher.
One of the things about the new Pixels that drives me insane is that you can't search your app drawer without also pulling up google search suggestions. (Because, you know, there weren't enough ways to get to a google search from the Android home screen.)
One of the first things I do on a Windows box is disable Cortana and the integrated web searching.
Why? Because if I wanted a damn internet search, I'd open my browser and search the internet. When I open the search function on my OS, I want it to search my local system. These days, the only way to do that is "find" and "grep."
Not only will it search for all kind of things, probably using MS servers for help, even when all you want is a filename, but it will be actively monitoring your activities, also probably using MS servers. From TFS (emphasis mine):
The company also is "supercharging" the search box so that users can more easily find people, related content, commands for apps and more before they actually start typing in the search box, as it will be contextually aware and offer proactive search results and suggestions.
I'd like to file this under: Do Not Want.
And, knowing MS, any blocking you might employ will disable search altogether.
OS and Apps as Spyware - wave of the Future.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
so search! very freedumbs!
Bing for Business -- isn't that the world's oldest profession?
Kill notifications, Kill non-essential updates, and Kill Cortana again, if necessary.
http://www.classicshell.net/
find the registry keys for edge and cortana. Delete them. Add the disable search key
~.old out the services that suck as well
About 15 minutes of work makes windows 10 functional.
It will be have nice ads too
I think that somewhere around 100% of the time, when someone does a search, they know whether they want to search their computer or the Internet. No one asked for "unified" search. We want to search our computers (and it has to f.....g *work*) *or* we want to search the web. Never both. If I click "search" on my computer, I want to find something on my computer. Usually I know it's there but I don't remember where I put it. If I want to search the web I'll bring up DuckDuckGo. There are NO practical use cases for "unified" search.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Don't f'n add Bing it is the worst search engine! It NEVER finds anything I am looking for. Never!
I wish I could search local-only by default.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
For the past several years, Microsoft been desperatly working to kill google. There fixxed the title for you.
Who the fuck is this and why should I give a damn about him?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wake me up when Microsoft does something really useful.