The Cluttered Search Bar
Windows 11 constantly attempts to integrate web content into the core operating system experience. One prominent example is “Search Highlights.” When you open the Start Menu and click into the search box, or simply hover over the magnifying glass on the taskbar, Windows displays dynamic content before you even type a query. This often includes cartoonish graphics related to “this day in history,” trending news stories, Microsoft Rewards prompts, and suggested web searches pulled directly from Bing. For users who simply want to search their local hard drive for a specific file or application, this daily influx of irrelevant internet content is a distracting visual clutter that slows down navigation.
Restoring a Clean Search
To remove the daily graphics, news feeds, and web suggestions, and disable Search Highlights completely in the Windows 11 Start Menu, you must turn off the feature within the privacy settings.
Press the Windows Key, type Settings, and hit Enter. In the left-hand navigation pane, select Privacy & security. On the right side, scroll down the page until you find the “Windows permissions” section. Click on the option labelled Search permissions. Scroll down this new page, past the SafeSearch and Cloud content search settings, until you reach a section specifically titled “More settings.” Here, you will find a toggle switch explicitly named Show search highlights (which describes showing content suggestions in search and the search box). Click this toggle switch to turn it Off. The change is immediate. When you open the Start Menu search now, it will present a clean, blank slate, ready only for your specific queries.