In Microsoft Word, if you right-click on any highlighted word or phrase in your document, one of the primary options in the context menu is “Search” or “Smart Lookup.” Clicking this option instantly opens a sidebar on the right side of your screen. This sidebar violently pulls live data from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, displaying web definitions, Wikipedia articles, and image search results related to the highlighted text.
While this is intended to be a helpful research tool, it is a significant privacy concern for legal professionals, medical workers, and corporate executives. If you accidentally trigger Smart Lookup on a highly confidential client name or an unannounced project codename, Microsoft Word immediately transmits that string of text out of your secure network and directly to Bing’s public search servers. To ensure absolute data confidentiality and prevent accidental data leakage to the cloud, you must completely disable the Smart Lookup feature.
Disabling Smart Lookup via Trust Center Settings
Microsoft ties this feature directly into its “Connected Experiences” telemetry engine. To kill the Bing search integration, you must sever Word’s connection to optional online services.
- Open the Microsoft Word desktop application.
- Bypass the Start Screen by clicking Blank document to enter the main editing interface.
- Look at the main menu ribbon at the top of the screen and click on File.
- Scroll to the absolute bottom of the left-hand blue sidebar and click on Options.
- A new Options window will appear. In the left-hand menu, click on Trust Center.
- In the main panel, click the large button labelled Trust Center Settings….
- A new dialogue box will open. In the left-hand menu, click on Privacy Options.
- In the main panel, click the button labelled Privacy Settings….
- Scroll down the long list of privacy toggles until you find the section labelled Experiences that analyze your content.
- Uncheck the box (or toggle the switch to Off) for Turn on experiences that analyze your content.
- (Optional but recommended for maximum privacy) Scroll down further and turn off Experiences that download online content as well.
- Click OK on all three open windows to save your changes and exit the settings menu.
You must completely restart Microsoft Word for the changes to take effect. Close the application and reopen it. When you highlight a word and right-click it, the “Search” or “Smart Lookup” option will either be completely greyed out or entirely missing from the context menu, guaranteeing that your text never leaves the local machine.