Starting July 13, 2026, Microsoft began rolling out a long-awaited opt-out for Bing and Microsoft Store results in Windows 11 Search, coupled with a decluttered homepage that ditches the MSN news feed. The update is currently exclusive to Windows Insiders in the Experimental Channel, but it marks the first time users can block online suggestions without hacking the registry. The two new toggles — tucked under Privacy & security — promise a local-only search experience that actually finds what you type.

A Cleaner Search Home

The first thing Insiders will notice is what’s missing. Gone are the daily quiz, trending searches, recommended games, and thumbnail-sized ads that crowded the search pane before you even typed a character. Instead, the search home screen now shows a short list of recent apps, folders, and files — nothing more. Microsoft calls it a “calmer” experience, and early testers at Windows Latest describe the difference as night and day.

But the decluttering doesn’t stop at the home screen. Search results themselves are now clearly labeled. An icon and text tell you immediately whether an entry is a local application, a system setting, a file, a web result, or a Store suggestion. Missed the label? The result’s metadata now includes file paths, modification dates, and previews where relevant. So when you search for “Outlook,” you won’t accidentally launch Edge with a Bing search because you overlooked a tiny “Web” tag.

Microsoft has also relaxed its spelling standards. Typo tolerance now handles dropped letters, extra characters, and partial words. In demos, “utlook” correctly returns Microsoft Outlook as the best match, rather than treating the gibberish as a web query. File searches accept as few as two characters, so finding “Q4_report.xlsx” by typing “Q4” finally works without resorting to wildcards.

Two Switches That Change Everything

The marquee feature lives in Settings > Privacy & security > Search. Inside a new section labeled “Show suggested search results,” you’ll find separate toggles for web search and Microsoft Store suggestions. Flip one, both, or neither — the choice is yours. Turn both off, and Windows Search becomes a purely local affair, limited to installed apps, indexed files, and system settings. If it can’t find a match, it now says so rather than funneling your misspelled intent to Bing.

That’s a fundamental shift from the current Windows 11 behavior, which mixes local and online results in the same panel and often elevates a web card above the program you were actually after. The new switches are completely independent: you could keep Store suggestions for app discovery while killing web search, or vice versa.

Crucially, these controls are now exposed through the regular Settings app — no ViveTool, no registry editing, no hidden experiments. The feature was first spotted as a dormant capability in Experimental build 26300.8697 back in June, but required manual activation with third-party tools. The July 13 announcement confirms the toggles are now part of Microsoft’s official Insider rollout.

Why This Matters to You

For everyday users, the immediate benefit is speed and sanity. Search results load faster because the system isn’t reaching out to Bing and the Store for every keystroke. The interface feels snappier, especially on low-spec machines where the old web-heavy panel could stutter. More importantly, you stop accidentally launching web browsers when you just wanted to open Task Manager.

Power users gain a first-party way to achieve what previously demanded community-made utilities or convoluted Group Policy tweaks. The ability to disable web suggestions doesn’t just declutter — it also eliminates a potential source of network lag when offline or on metered connections. Combined with the improved ranking algorithms that now prioritize local apps and files, Windows Search starts to resemble the fast, keyboard-driven launcher that macOS users enjoy with Spotlight.

For IT admins, the update is tantalizing but not yet actionable. The changes are confined to the Experimental Channel, and Microsoft has announced no corresponding Group Policy or stable-build timeline. Deploying the feature in a production environment would mean moving machines onto bleeding-edge Insiders builds, which is a non-starter. However, the appearance of user-facing toggles strongly suggests that future Group Policy equivalents will follow, potentially simplifying device configuration without requiring custom PowerShell or registry scripts.

Windows Search has been slowly turning into a billboard for years. Starting with Windows 10, Microsoft injected web results and app-store suggestions into every query, arguing that users wanted a universal search box that could find anything — local or online. In practice, the experience often felt like a Bing entry point that sometimes found your files, if it felt like it.

The backlash was immediate and persistent. Users complained that typing “control panel” returned a Bing search for “control panel” instead of the actual Control Panel. Registry hacks like disabling BingSearchEnabled and CortanaConsent proliferated on forums. Third-party launchers such as Listary and Everything gained loyal followings purely because they respected the user’s intent to search locally.

Microsoft did make incremental adjustments. In Windows 11 22H2, it added a single toggle to “Search online and include web results,” but that switch still left Store suggestions and MSN content untouched. The search home screen grew ever more cluttered, with Microsoft treating it as a miniature MSN homepage. By 2025, the daily quiz and trending topics had become symbols of the OS’s ad-creep.

The Insider experiment announced on July 13, 2026, represents Microsoft’s most direct response to that criticism. The removal of promotional content from web results, the home screen cleanup, and the independent toggles for web and Store suggestions didn’t happen in a vacuum. They’re the culmination of user feedback submitted through the Feedback Hub, upvoted posts on Reddit, and blunt complaints in the Windows Insider community. Microsoft even name-checked that feedback in the official blog post, with engineering manager Jeff Petty acknowledging the need for a “more dependable” and “easier to scan” search.

How to Get the New Search Now

If you’re willing to live on the edge, here’s how to try it today:

  1. Join the Experimental Channel. Open Settings > Windows Update > Windows Insider Program, sign in with your Microsoft account, and select the Experimental Channel. This channel is the most unstable — expect crashes and incomplete features. Do not enroll a daily driver.
  2. Force the Controlled Feature Rollout. Once on the correct build, the new search may not appear immediately. Restart your computer — Microsoft says this can trigger availability. If that fails, open the Feature flags page (accessible via about:flags in Edge’s address bar, though the exact method for Search experiment toggles isn’t publicly documented — some Insiders report success by enabling “SearchBoxTopAnswerSearches” or similar flags using ViveTool, but this is unsupported). Ideally, the rollout will hit your machine within a few days.
  3. Find the toggles. Navigate to Settings > Privacy & security > Search. Look for the new “Show suggested search results” area. Toggle off “Bing web search” and “Microsoft Store suggestions” as desired.
  4. Test and report. Try misspelled app names, short file queries, and searches with both toggles off. If something breaks, report it via the Feedback Hub under Desktop Environment > Search. Microsoft specifically requests test cases involving cloud-stored files, regional web results, and disabled online suggestions.

For everyone else, patience is the only prescription. There’s no confirmed date for these changes to hit stable Windows 11 installations, including 25H2 or the upcoming 26H2. In the meantime, you can mimic some of the benefits using existing settings: turn off “Search online and include web results” in Search permissions (though this doesn’t affect Store suggestions) or disable web integration via registry (risky, may reset with updates). The latter requires diving into HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search and setting DisableWebSearch to 1, which is thoroughly unsupported.

What to Watch Next

The Experimental Channel rollout is only the beginning. Microsoft has said it will continue tweaking ranking algorithms over the coming months, so expect search to get better at surfacing settings, cloud files, and common apps even when your spelling wanders. The bigger question is when these improvements will graduate. If history is any guide, features that appear in the summer Insider build often ship in the fall feature update. That would put a public release around September or October 2026, possibly as part of Windows 11 26H2.

Until then, the new toggles serve as a proof of concept: Microsoft can make Windows Search behave like a local tool first, with the web as an optional layer. For those who’ve waited years for this moment, the toggles aren’t just a convenience — they’re an acknowledgment that search should respect the user’s intent, not the company’s advertising roadmap.