A weather tile is now displayed at the top of search

Jun 23, 2020 06:34 GMT  ·  By

There’s a lot Microsoft needs to improve in the Windows Search tool, but in the meantime, the company decided to go for a smaller tweak that has apparently generated mixed reactions in the user community.

Starting this week, Microsoft has enabled a small weather tile in the search UI, showing the current weather conditions and temperature in the top left corner when clicking the search icon in the taskbar.

A weather forecast link launches the Weather app on Windows 10 to display additional information.

What’s important to know is that this is a server-side switch that’s not directly linked with a specific Windows 10 build. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re running Windows 10 version 1903 or version 2004 because Microsoft is the one that can enable it using a server setting.

Rollout in stages

And by the looks of things, the whole thing takes place in stages, as not everyone is getting the weather tile right now – as you can see in the screenshot at the top, no weather data shows up on my device when launching the search UI, despite everything configured correctly.

The weather info can only show up on your device if access to the location data is enabled on Windows 10. In other words, you need to head over to the Settings app and enable location services, otherwise Windows 10 can’t generate weather data for your location.

As said, this feature has been received with mixed reactions. While some say it’s a cool improvement that makes the search UI even more useful, especially as some users actually search for weather data, others believe it’s more or less a redundant update because you can just look out the window for such information.

For now, however, the rollout apparently takes place in stages, so it remains to be seen how fast it lands on all Windows 10 devices out there.

The updated UI with weather info

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

The current search UI without weather info
The updated UI with weather info
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