14 DAY TRIAL // One of the things that Windows 10 tries to make better is the search option which allows users to quickly search for content straight from the taskbar with the help of a brand new button placed near the multiple desktops icon.
Needless to say, the new search feature is pretty much useless because it only looks for information online and then fires up Internet Explorer to open links, so you still need to launch the Start menu and use its own search tool to find locally-stored data.
Unsurprisingly, this quickly led to an avalanche of bad feedback from users who downloaded and installed Windows 10 Technical Preview, with many of the suggestions asking Microsoft to either remove the search option or tweak it in such a way that it would be easier to find content both online and offline.
The feedback app that’s incorporated in Windows 10 Preview already includes requests submitted from users who think that the search option isn’t really helpful in the current form.
“Just a terrible idea”
At this point, the suggestion with the biggest number of votes describes the search option “as a terrible idea” because it brings results from the web, even though users would expect it to be a more powerful Windows search feature that would also look on the local drives.
“If I want to search the web I will start IE or any other browser and a do a search,” one user writes. Nearly 400 other people agreed and submitted their votes in this regard.
Others compare the Windows search feature with third-party apps and claim that Microsoft’s option is years behind what you can find right now with a quick search online.
Advanced options such as exact date and time ranges, case sensitive searches, regular expressions for both file names and content should all be available, Microsoft said.
No option to disable it
The taskbar search button cannot be disabled for the time being, but Microsoft is very likely to offer this possibility in the final version of Windows 10.
The company has promised to listen to all this feedback and certain modifications could be implemented before the stable operating system hits the market in spring 2015, but it remains to be seen if the search feature is one of those that will get tweaked in the coming months.
At this point, however, this search engine is clearly an option that many avoid to use because of its exclusive online focus, so adding more capabilities should be a priority for the next Windows 10 builds.