Disabling Bing search in the Windows 11 Start Menu will reduce the use of resources you don’t need. The impact of disabling this will speed up the process of searching for applications, documents, or folders.
The Start Menu in Windows 11 has a feature where you can search using Bing. Whenever you search for something on your device like an app, document, or folder, Bing also helps you find something from the internet.
Most people use the Windows 11 search tool to search for files and programs that are on their computer’s locale. But when you type in words, the search tool also shows results from Bing on the internet. Online results are displayed when you use the search bar and click an option to search the web. The results are displayed with arrows indicating that they match the results from Bing.
Most people using Windows 11 think that web searches on their computer are just a way for Microsoft to advertise Bing, but that doesn’t help when you’re looking for files stored on your computer.
In addition, searching using Bing will send information to Microsoft servers. Bing is also not very good at finding things in other countries, especially if people speak different languages.
Disable Bing Search in Windows 11
If you don’t like Bing in the Start menu, you can use different ways to remove it, depending on how much of a distraction it is. If one method doesn’t work, you can try another way.
You can turn off Bing’s search feature in a few different ways.
- Turn off the Cloud content search feature in Settings.
- Disable Bing search through the Group Policy Editor.
- Disable Bing search through Registry Editor.
How to disable Bing search through Settings
The easiest way to remove Bing from the Start Menu is from Windows Settings. Here are the steps:
- Open Windows 11 “Settings”. You can open it by using the (WIN + I) button.
- Then navigate to “Privacy &; security > Search permissions”.
- On the right panel, in the “Cloud content search” section, slide the switch to the left to turn off “Microsoft account” and “Work or School account”.
This setting does not prevent your computer from displaying search results from the Internet in total. To completely turn off Bing search from the Internet, you must also change the settings on the computer in the “Group Policy Editor” and “Windows Registry”.
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How to disable Bing search through Group Policy Editor
- Open the “Run” dialog box with the shortcut key (WIN + R).
- Type “gpedit.msc” and click the OK and Enter buttons.
- Then navigate to “Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search”.
- On the right panel, double-click on “Do not allow web search” and “Don’t search the web or display web results in Search”.
- Select “Enabled” on the policy setting, then click Apply and OK to apply the policy.
If you are after changing the settings in the Group Policy Editor and the web search results are still displayed, you need to make additional settings in your Windows Registry.
How to disable Bing search through Registry Editor
- Open the “Run” dialog box with the shortcut key (WIN + R).
- Type “regedit” and click the OK and Enter buttons.
- Then navigate to “Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search”.
- Right-click on the “Search” folder and select “New > DWORD (32-bit) Value”.
- Name the new DWORD value “BingSearchEnabled”.
- Double-click the new DWORD “BingSearchEnabled” and set the data to 0 then click OK.
- Close the Windows Registry when finished.
- Restart your computer.
When you Search for something in Windows 11, you won’t see Bing Search or “Search the web” anymore. If you want Bing Search back, open the Windows Registry and deletethe “BingSearchEnabled” you created earlier.