Newsletter Archives

• Happy New Year!

  Posted on January 6, 2025 at 00:16 CST by Will Fastie

  

  ISSUE 22.01 • 2025-01-06

  EDITORIAL

  

  By Will Fastie

  To begin 2025, we bring you our best advice about keeping your PC spit-polished and ready for another year of hard work.

  The article “Let your PC start the new year right!” has been a staple around here for years. The tradition is now in the capable hands of our resident hardware expert, Ben Myers, after a long run from Fred Langa.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (22.01.0, 2025-01-06).

  Editorial Happy New Year!, Newsletter Archives, Newsletters, Search

• Microsoft removes Win10 File Explorer features without notice

  Posted on January 8, 2024 at 02:45 CST by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 21.02 • 2024-01-08

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Microsoft’s updates for Windows 10 in November and December 2023 made significant changes to the File Explorer interface and its search functionality. But the Redmond software giant has posted no written information about the differences or how users can configure them.

  Some of the modifications revert File Explorer to the configuration it had in Windows 10 19H2, the version that existed way back in November 2019.

  Ironically, you may find that you actually prefer the old behaviors to the new ones.

  But that isn’t the point. The point is that changes of this magnitude cry out for written explanations from Microsoft.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.02.0, 2024-01-08).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Public Defender Digital Markets Act, EU, European Union, File Explorer, KB5032278, KB5033372, Newsletters, Regulation, Search, Windows 10

• Happy New Year!

  Posted on January 1, 2024 at 02:45 CST by Will Fastie

  EDITORIAL

  

  By Will Fastie

  To begin 2024, we bring you our best advice about keeping your PC spit-polished and ready for another year of hard work.

  The article “Let your PC start the new year right!” has been a staple around here for years. The tradition is now in the capable hands of our resident hardware expert, Ben Myers, after a long run from Fred Langa.

  The core of the article will remain the same, with abundant references to the classic and detailed PC-maintenance how-tos originally published in Windows Secrets — and now available in our newsletter archives.

  Did we miss anything? Got ideas about what we should include next time around? As always, we listen to the forums carefully.

  Speaking of the archives, we know that they have not been as accessible as they should be. During the second half of 2023, we worked on under-the-cover repairs and enhancements to our system, with the goal of improving our on-site search capability. This, as it turns out, was a much bigger project than first anticipated.

  I had hoped to offer this as a New Year’s gift to all our members, but as the busy end of the publishing year approached, the project slowed. We will be resuming this work in earnest this month and hope to make a formal announcement of the new capabilities by the end of the first quarter — sooner, if possible.

  Our very best wishes for a peaceful, productive, and prosperous 2024.

  Read the bonus Plus Newsletter (21.01.0, 2024-01-01).

  Editorial Happy New Year!, Newsletter Archives, Newsletters, Search

• Why can’t search just search?

  Posted on April 4, 2022 at 02:42 CDT by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  PATCH WATCH

  

  By Susan Bradley

  Microsoft introduces “search highlights,” another feature we probably don’t want and didn’t ask for.

  In the April cumulative updates for Windows 10 and Windows 11, Microsoft will be bringing some changes to Windows’ desktop search. Unfortunately, it won’t fix what we really want fixed. Instead, it will be adding another feature we don’t want. The feature, called “search highlights,” began to roll out on March 22 to Windows 10 users who had installed the March 2022 preview update (KB5011543).

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.14.0, 2022-04-04).

  Patch Watch Newsletters, Patch Lady Posts, Patch Watch, Search, Windows Search

• Is Microsoft messing with your Win10 Search box?

  Posted on February 3, 2020 at 10:46 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  

  Howard Goldberg has been discussing the change in his Win10 version 1909 Search bar text, from “Type here to search” (shown above) to “Start a web search.” Digging deeper, it appears that Microsoft is changing Windows Search box builds without telling anybody.

  It’s a strange, and very visible, intrusion — and, given the lack of official documentation, your observations may help us understand.

  Details in Computerworld Woody on Windows.

  Windows Patches/Security Search, Win10 1903, Win10 1909

• Getting the most from Windows Search – Part 2

  Posted on October 6, 2011 at 06:42 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  If you’ve ever run a search in Windows 7, you should see the whole story.

  Including the undocumented parts.

  Windows Secrets Newsletter’s new Top Story.

  Windows News Search

• Google’s US search market share increases, but the rules changed

  Posted on October 15, 2010 at 08:47 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Last month I wrote about Bing stealing Yahoo search market share, and explained why that didn’t mean much: as of August 24, the Bing engine effectively replaced the Yahoo search engine, so even if you see Yahoo on the screen, the results and the marketing oomph go to Microsoft.

  This month, comScore reports an important change. According to their just-released report, Google’s U.S. market share went up from 65.4% in August to 66.1% in September. At the same time, Bing/Yahoo declined from 28.5 to 27.9%.

  While the numbers seem impressive, you have to take them with more than a dash of salt. comScore changed the way it counts searches, in response to Google’s new Instant Search technology (which some wags note isn’t all that new, but I digress).

  As Cameron Meierhofer on the comScore blog explains,

  [T]he comScore panel provides visibility into all events that a user is conducting and all the HTTP calls associated with the user’s actions. Based on this insight, we have developed a priority scoring system that allows us to identify search results with explicit user action and interstitial results with a sufficiently long pause to suggest some level of implicit engagement.

  If that sounds like a situation just begging to mess up search site usage scores, you’re right. In the end, comScore punted, assigning an arbitrary time-out period of three seconds, “Query result pages without explicit user action, but with a pause of at least 3 seconds, are considered as indicating ‘implicit’ engagement and will count towards Total Core Search.”

  As a dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon, I have to wonder out loud if comScore chose that three second threshhold before or after they saw the statistics for September.

  Any way, it’s a new race from this point on, and it’ll be interesting to see how Google and Microsoft fare. We won’t really be able to compare apples to apples until the October results are out.

  And, of course, the really important numbers in the long run are for mobile search. But that’s another story.

   

  Other Bing, Google, Search, Yahoo