It's been a while since I used Windows regularly or seriously, but I remember start menu search actually being good - maybe around Win7 days? You would just press <Win>, type a few letters of the software you wanted and hit enter, and it would work every time with minimal latency.

You know, like KDE Plasma in 2026.

I hate that so much. When blind people are trying to start JAWS (the screen reader) by typing "jaws" into the start menu and pressing Enter, it will sometimes pull up a Bing page on Jaws the movie instead. And the blind person is just sitting there waiting for the screen reader to start. I tell people to use the run dialog for that reason. Sucks but that's what you have to do in the age of inshittisoft.

'Randomly' here likely corresponds to a typo in the search term.

If I type "Visual Std" instead of "Visual Stu" it goes to the Bing results.

Alternatively it shows No results if you disable Bing in the Search settings found in the top right meatballs menu.

I also would expect fuzzy search by default instead of typos sending users to Bing.

Objectively it wastes developer time making the OS in a non linear way more expensive for companies. Its like a minthly subscription for ever more minutes.

It takes literally a click to deactivate it though. One could argue about Bing Search being the default, but I didn’t run the user surveys to see, which is best for the average user.