Speeding up 11’s search

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If you want to speed up Windows 11 searching of your computer’s applications rather than building shortcuts or using their menu app, one of the best t
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Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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katiedid, abbodi86, Great Lake Bunyip, Casey H, GeeBeeDee, rpetruzz, TechTango, Cybertooth, PL1, Perq

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Don’t recall ever being there before. Both selections were already off. WIN 11 Pro 23H2.
Casey H.

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Additionally, you can turn off seeing Copilot in Start Menu Search (AND, remove all the “Search the web” clutter), via a registry tweak:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search

add the dword BingSearchEnabled and set it to 0 (disable) or 1 (enable – same as without this dword)

The Settings page w/”Search permissions” (under “Privacy & security”), will now display at the top of the page:

“Some of these settings are managed by your organization.”

It will also remove access to the “More settings”:”Show search highlights – See content suggestions in the search box and in search home”

While keeping the cloud & internet search content Off, I do like to keep “Search history on this device” On in order to (locally) optimize my Start Menu Search results based on my typical usage.

 

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Cybertooth

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Turning off cloud searching definitely helps.

Depending on what you’re doing, something else that can help with searching is in bypassing the Windows search index. If you’re searching for the contents of files, you need the index, but if you’re searching for just file names, then you can go a lot faster (especially extensive searches) by bypassing the index.

I haven’t spent enough time with Windows searching to know how to do that with built-in Windows searching, but I think a lot of third-party tools either allow for bypassing content searching, or limiting to filename searches exclusively.

One of the things that I’ve found that makes a third-party tool easy to get to (rather than having to create shortcuts, or navigate the Start window) is to open my preferred search tool (in my case, I like AgentRansack), then in the Task Bar select “pin To Task Bar”.  Then drag the icon to the left of the Task Bar.

A useful keyboard shortcut to know about is if you use the Windows logo key and press a numeric digit, then Windows will pop up an application that is shown in the tool bar, numbering incrementally from left to right.  Thus, with my search tool located at the far left of the Task Bar, pressing Logo-1 will pop up the interface for the search tool.  I’ve done this enough that it’s ingrained in my muscle memory, where I do that out of habit, without thinking about it.

As noted, I like the flexibility of AgentRansack, where I can do simple searches, or do more extensive searching, when needed.  AgentRansack also puts an icon in the Windows Explorer, so I can right-click on a folder, select the AgentRansack icon and begin searching in just that folder. And when I need, I can do content searching, even if it’s not something I need frequently.

There are other file search utilities.  Two that I know of are Everything and WizTree, both free and very fast.

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