I believe there is a way to disable bing search by setting some flags in the windows registry. I was affected by this bug, and the way to fix it was to disable

I believe there is a way to disable bing search by setting some flags in the windows registry. I was affected by this bug, and the way to fix it was to disable online search. There's a bunch of articles online on how to do it, eg: https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/02/05/its-not-just-you-windows-10-search-is-giving-blank-results/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/02/05/its-not-just-you-wi... Basically have to set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\BingSearchEnabled to 0 and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\CortanaConsent to 0 However, I agree with you, that I would've preferd this to be turned off by default. Extra dependencies that bring no extra value are net negative, as seen in there current case where a server-side problem stopped my local search from working.