The topic Windows Search will stop searching your embarrassing typos on Bing is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
I’m convinced that my most common usage for Bing is searching for really badly-typed names of apps on my computer. I don’t mean it, of course, but when I’m quickly typing in an app name into Windows Search, and I hit the Enter key before checking for typos, it’ll take my mangled excuse for a word, fail to find an app that matches it, and instead feed it to Bing to figure out what on Earth I wanted.
Fortunately, a new feature is arriving on Windows 11 that will save us clumsy typers. It’ll do a better job trying to match your words to an app, and early tests are pretty promising.
Windows Latest has been going over the latest Experimental build for Windows 11 and noticed something interesting. The Search function is getting a lot better at figuring out which app you want to launch, even when you give it the bare minimum to work with.
Two of the examples Windows Latest gave (typing ‘utlook’ for Outlook and ‘pwerp’ for PowerPoint) also work on my non-Experimental Windows 11 machine, so it seems that this level of functionality has been around for a while now. However, it also tested ‘tskm’ for Task Manager, and typing that triggers my Windows 11 machine to do a web search, while the Experimental build finds the app.
Windows Latest also notes that Microsoft is working on a toggle that will force Windows Search to search locally. That means anything you enter will be compared against what’s on your PC and will not include web searches or Microsoft Store entries. It sounds like great news for users and potentially bad news for the Bing team if it notices its usage statistics drop when the update gets released.
If you often tap the Windows key to search, this is good news.