How to Disable Bing Search in Windows 10 – Easy Method

Some people think that the Bing search features of Windows 10 are quite cool while others (including me) think that these features are completely annoying. Whenever you search for a file/folder on your Windows 10 search field, Mr.Bing pops-up with unnecessary suggestions from the Internet.

There are serious downsides to having Bing enabled in your Windows 10 search. First of all, it searches both your PC and web for your query which increases the work-load and makes things slower. Second, it makes it slow for you to sift through the search results.

There used to be a toggle on/off option for doing this in the previous versions of Windows, but Microsoft removed that in the October 2018 update. But, you don’t have to worry because there’s another simple and effective way to disable Bing search in Windows 10.

Caution: This method requires you to edit your Windows Registry, so you better backup both your Registry and your entire system to be safe in case of any issues.

Disable Bing Search in Windows 10

Open the Start menu (or press the Windows key) and search for “regedit” (without quotes). Run the regedit command by pressing enter or double-clicking the search result.

In the Registry Editor, navigate to the following key from the left sidebar.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search

Now, right-click the Search option and create a new DWORD (32-Bit) Value. Name the new value as BingSearchEnabled.

Double-click the BingSearchEnabled value to open its properties. Make sure the value data is set to 0. Normally, it should be 0 by default, but if it doesn’t then change it and hit OK.

In the right sidebar, you should see another value named CortanaConsent. Double-click to open its properties and set its value data to 0 as well. If you don’t see CortanaConsent, then create it by following the same method as mentioned in Step 3.

Close the Registry Editor and test your Windows search. Bing search should now be disabled in all your Windows 10 searches. It should only show you local results.

If it isn’t working then restart your PC for the changes to take effect.

What if I want to enable Bing in Windows 10 again?

Not a problem! You can easily do so by following the same steps again, but instead of setting the values to 0 for both CortanaConsent and BingSearchEnabled, you need to set their value data to 1. Doing so will re-enable Bing search in Windows 10.

Make Start menu search use Google

So, you want to keep the search feature on in Windows 10, but instead of using Bing, you want to use Google for your searches. Fortunately, that’s very easy to do as well. All you have to do is download an extension for your browser, Chrometana for Google Chrome or Bing to Google for Firefox.

These extensions work in the background and send all your searches to Google instead of Bing.

Should you keep the Bing search in Windows enabled?

This totally depends on what you need. If you only want to use the Windows search feature for local searches then it’s better to keep the Bing search turned off as it slows down the entire process.

However, if you want to carry out all your local and web-based searches directly from your Windows Start menu then you should keep it enabled.

In the end

If you are tired of the slow search process in the Start menu search bar then you need to turn the web-based search off. Just use it to carry out local searches and it will be lightning fast.

Feel free to let us know how you use the search menu in Windows, local or online?

Dilawar Hussain
Categories: Uncategorized