Microsoft is unveiling an ambitious effort to overhaul its search experience in Office, Windows, Bing and more today. Dubbed Microsoft Search, the new search experience will first start appearing on Bing and Office.com today. Bing isn’t going away, but Microsoft Search is the new name for a combination of Bing and the search results you might expect to find in Windows applications. It’s designed to combine traditional search results with commands, app features, and personalized results. Search is being moved to a central area in Office apps, allowing Excel users to find commands and features in results alongside documents and other search results.
I’ve never been a fan of combining web and local search results on my operating system’s search tool – the two are clearly separated in my mind and I regard them as two entirely different and distinct entities. I’m sure I’m revealing my age here, and that younger generations don’t perceive this distinction at all, but I’m just hoping I can turn this off.
That always bothered the hell out of me. This seems designed to further erode the mental distinction between local and cloud resources in the user’s mind and engender multiple types of vendor lock in.
Same. Especially when you’re trying to find something on your local machine and a bunch of web search results come up. If I wanted to search the web, I would’ve done so, you dolts
Right; injecting a bit more of the privacy-problems-laden internet search into local searches. I think I’ll pass…
Young folks are more confused by what a “file” is – they saved it in Photoshop, what do you mean on the hard drive?!
But honestly, the more magic mixing this stuff does, the more confusing it is for users – the less they rely on it (rightfully). The feature will end up getting ignored.
Are they really?
While I hate these mixed search result thing, my elderly (70 yo) mother does like it on windows. Wanna search something on the web? Just type it in the whatever-I-dont-care bar and you get the results. You forgot you already have downloaded this thing you are searching for? The results return your local version too.
And I got to say that it does makes sense for non-tech people. We are attuned to typing urls manually when required, use a specific search engine which matches our requirements, but non tech-minded people could not care less. They just want the answer to their search, not think about the intents or the target of their search. Whether it is the Android search bar, the windows search bar or the whatever universal search bar does make sense. People do not want to organize stuff, their want to use a universal search to find it with the magical cloud.
It kind of makes sense even for tech people too if they don’t know where what they are looking for might be located. The problem is that there’s no way to conditionally disable it and only search the local system without opening whatever application handles that data, and there’s no way to choose what to prioritize (for example, my work laptop prioritizes files from our code with ‘thunder’ in their name that I’ve never touched over Mozilla Thunderbird (which I use daily) when I just search ‘thunder’).
If MS or any of the others are offering up mixed web and local search results, which I think they have for a while tbh — then the important minimum distinction within the results shown needs to be keeping them with separate “web” and “local” results sections, and not a free-for-all mixture.
Which at least intrusive would be highly confusing, and very easily could be labelled as being deceptive.
Edited 2018-09-25 14:58 UTC
With 1 flip of a switch microsht will share your whole hard drive and index it to bing for others to search too, isn’t that great.
Gotta rope those suckers into using Bing somehow!
Cause it just ain’t competing that well on its own.
Plus, hey, now it aggregates the surveillance and tracking of everything that users do.
Greatly beneficial to Microsoft, perhaps good for some naive end users, bad for everyone else.
Personally, I dislike the lack of distinction. For some people who don’t care where it is so long as they can find it, this might work well, but it promotes lazy thinking: a lack of awareness as to where something is so that if you lose access to the data, you have little understanding as to why.
By understanding where something is; by being aware of what is going on with your data and files, you have more power over your data. You might like backing data up to the cloud, but if all your data is in the cloud and you lose internet access, you are going to be put off. If you know that you can save it locally and still have access.
More importantly, knowing where the data is going, knowing the distinction makes you a better consumer in that you can decide to go with a product that gives you power over saving your data locally vs a server that you can lose access to.
This definitely sounds like a search engine designed to promote lazy thinking and thus a dependent customer.
Search seems to be being used as a replacement for good UI design, which reminds me of the Software Disenchantment article up right now here too.
Especially it being placed more prominently in Office apps to find commands – if users are having trouble finding a command, then the GUI design is a failure. The fix isn’t to tack search on as a crutch.
At the OS level, it does seem like a natural next step of Cortana however.
They may at some point however find themselves on the end of an anticompetitive behaviour investigation if they continue to *force* bing and edge, as it’s essentially leveraging their monopoly in the desktop space to take market share in search and browser markets. If they wanted to head that off they’d provide APIs to hook into the search and replace it (with the same kinds of warnings as when you switch browsers if they wanted).
Gnome does it in a nice way. 1) It looks for an application matching description/name that is already installed. Then it looks for something similar in the settings, then Software, then local documents, then very last it has ‘search the web for $stuff_you_typed’. But it’s all very well defined and obvious what you’re selecting.
Why would anyone use Bing?
I surely qualify as both old fart and computer geek, and I find that the recent trend of “all eggs in the same basket” hinders in a heavy manner not only my usage of computing devices, but my ‘non-connected life’ as well.
Two unrelated examples that all all related to the same basic trend, at least in my mind:
1) windows 10 start button already shows both installed apps, documents and apps to be installed in search results, making it difficult to tell apart which is which, or to customize which categories to search in/for
2) the smartphone used to do everything! Just today I used it as identification device, camera, phone, and internet connection provider.
One problem is that I often have to do many of those operations in parallel, but the phone does not support it. Ex: when making a phone call the internet connection drops off (thanks to dual sim), so homebanking websites which sends you/requests from you a code given via voice call become awkward.
Another problem is the enormous impairment when the phone is not available, even temporarily. Ex: I recently had to deal with smart lock’ systems that use a smartphone app or sms message to open the door of an airbnb home. The risk is that if the phone runs out of battery or falls and breaks, or gets stolen, I can neither enter the home nor call the owner any more.
I hope they don’t go the Windows 7 route of removing all the Advanced Search GUI in favor of forcing people to use Windows Advanced Query Syntax. That was one of the most aggravating things about upgrading to 7 from Vista. Especially when I learned that syntax wasn’t included in the local Help and they stopped hosting the documentation online.
Unfortunately the article mentions that, “Microsoft Teams seems to be the biggest inspiration for this new search push. Microsoft added a command / search bar to the top of Microsoft Teams, and it allows users to quickly access app features or run commands in the chat app.”
I’ve used Microsoft Teams. At times it feels like the second coming of Windows 7 Search. No GUI, just a simple search box. If you want anything more than universal search, you’re going to need to go documentation delving. Sure, it has autocomplete, but that mostly useful for helping you do stuff you know how to do faster. It’s basically worthless for figuring out the syntax in the first place.
This will play badly with my OCD, the urge to thouroughly check all search results…
How can I print the search results? I was thinking about it. When I try the original page printed. Upon which I was searching.
https://www.printererrorrepair.com/canon-customer-service/