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by jedieaston 2198 days ago
Just checked: in Windows 8.1 (and therefore, all versions of Windows 10), the "Don't search the web or display web results in Search" Group Policy works fine in Pro/Enterprise/Education/Business. The "Disable Microsoft Consumer Experiences" one only works in Enterprise/Education, however.

If you are on Home, and don't have gpedit.msc, make a new DWORD in "Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer", call it "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions", and set it to 1. Upon reboot Bing will no longer appear in your start menu.
2 comments
nickjj 2198 days ago
On my Windows 10 Pro 20.04 edition, that group policy has no effect. The only way to get rid of it was to use the registry edit you've also referenced.
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jedieaston 2198 days ago
Odd. Did you run gpupdate /force afterwards? I've deployed it to Pro boxes before with no issues.
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nickjj 2198 days ago
Nope, I enabled the setting and rebooted and still saw the search results.

Does gpupdate /force do something different than what rebooting would do?

Also did you do it on Pro boxes with the 2004 update? This behavior of the setting not working only started with 2004.

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syntheticcorp 2198 days ago
I'm now running a 2004 updated Pro host with that Group Policy setting and don't see any web search results. I also checked my registry and I don't have that DWORD key.

Rebooting will refresh the group policy, so that should have worked. Maybe try also enabling the "Do not allow Web Search" policy which is adjacent in Admin Templates > Windows Components > Search. That seems to be all the configuration I have to make it work.

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nickjj 2198 days ago
I have all 3 of these set to "enabled":

- Do not allow web search

- Don't search the web or display web results in Search

- Don't search the web or display web results over metered connections

According to the help menu for the middle one it states: "If you enable this policy setting, queries won't be performed on the web and web results won't be displayed when a user performs a query in Search.".

Although Microsoft's official documentation states these only apply to Enterprise edition based on: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/g...

You can see that setting listed on the bottom of the page, but it's not super clear because it's referencing an older version of Windows in those docs.

Maybe you have another tool blocking it, or you've blocked it at the /etc/hosts level in the past?

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lostmsu 2198 days ago
Thank you! That is the thing, that finally worked!

BTW, you only need to log off/log on again.

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