Windows Search has an off switch for Bing now, and everyone gets it

You press the Windows key, type the first few letters of a document, and Windows offers you a Bing search, three Microsoft Store apps and, eventually, your file. That behaviour finally has a switch. Microsoft's release notes for KB5120998 put it plainly: "A new setting in Settings > Privacy & Security > Search lets you choose whether web and Microsoft Store suggestions appear alongside local results."

Europeans have had something like this for a while, forced out of Microsoft by regulation. What changed is that it is now going to everybody. The toggles live under Settings, Privacy and security, Search, in a section called Show suggested search results, and web results and Store suggestions can be switched off independently. People who have tried it all report the same thing: the search panel gets noticeably faster once it stops waiting on the internet before showing you your own files.

The same update also indexes your most-used folders automatically, controlled in the same place under "Automatically find additional relevant locations". Between the two, local search on Windows 11 becomes something close to what most people assumed it already was.

One honest caveat. KB5120998 is an optional preview update, and it is the one we wrote about last week when people reported mouse cursors reverting and wallpapers turning black. If those bugs would bother you, wait for the change to arrive in a normal monthly update rather than chasing it. Tendvane's check-for-updates shows what Windows is currently offering and which parts of it are optional, so you can tell the difference before you click install.