Cortana Is Leaving Windows 10’s Search Bar, But Bing Stays
In the upcoming release of Windows 10, codenamed 19H1, Cortana and the search bar are breaking up and moving into separate houses. Unfortunately, the search bar won custody of Bing. Windows 10 19H1 is expected for release around April 2019.
The separation was announced by Microsoft in a blog post unveiling Windows Insider build 18317.
All jesting aside, the deep integration of Search and Cortana is one of the biggest complaints about Windows 10. We’ve taken time to show you how to hide and disable Cortana, and how to force Cortana to search Google instead of Bing. But if you liked and wanted the search bar, then you had to put up with Cortana. Thankfully Microsoft is finally taking care of that issue. But unfortunately, you’ll still have to put up with cloud searching.
As shown above, in 19H1, you will have a search box and a Cortana icon. You can turn off either or both. To disable Cortana, right-click the taskbar and uncheck “Show Cortana Button.” To disable the search box, right-click the taskbar and select Search > Hidden. You can also select “Show Search Icon” here if you’d rather just see a magnifying glass icon that takes up less room on your taskbar instead of the full search box.
The change doesn’t quite go far enough in our opinions. The search bar still incorporates Bing, and it’s no longer possible to disable Bing. Integrated web searches in the taskbar have some problems, as shown in the new settings for search.
As you can see, Windows now has adult content filter options for your search bar. And, while that’s a good thing to have if the search bar is going to provide web results, Bing’s SafeSearch is not always a guarantee that the results you get are safe for work. In fact, Bing has been really bad.