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by nickjj 2201 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.
1 comments
syntheticcorp 2201 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 2200 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?

link