Windows 11 features a large Search Box directly on the taskbar. By default, Microsoft populates this box with “Search Highlights”—dynamic icons and text snippets that change daily. You might see a small graphic of a historical figure, a cartoon globe for Earth Day, or a snippet of trending news. When you click the search box, a massive flyout panel appears displaying top news stories, daily quotes, and suggested web searches.
While Microsoft intends for this to be a fun, engaging “Discover” experience, it is highly distracting for users who simply want to search their local hard drive for a specific Word document. The colourful graphics break the visual consistency of the taskbar, and the news articles consume system resources to load in the background. If you prefer a utilitarian, locally-focused search experience, you can easily disable these web-based highlights.
Disabling Search Highlights via Settings
You can turn off this feature directly from the main Privacy & Security settings menu without having to edit the Windows Registry.
- Click the Start button and select the Settings app (the gear icon).
- In the left-hand navigation sidebar of the Settings window, click on Privacy & security.
- Scroll down the main panel until you reach the “Windows permissions” section.
- Click on Search permissions.
- Scroll all the way down to the very bottom of this long page. Look for the section titled More settings.
- Locate the toggle switch labelled Show search highlights (the description will mention showing content suggestions in the search box and search home).
- Click the switch to turn it Off.
The change is instantaneous. If you look down at your taskbar right now, the colourful cartoon graphic in the search box will have vanished, replaced by a simple, static magnifying glass icon. Furthermore, when you click the search box, the massive panel of trending news stories will be gone, replaced by a clean list of your most recently used local applications and files.