I turned off 3 things in Windows 11 and the Start menu finally felt useful

Most of us use the Start menu to launch apps. We hit the Windows key, type a couple letters, and expect our PC to find what we need. When Windows can find a local match, it usually does. The problem shows up the moment it can't: type a partial word, a misspelling, or anything that doesn't match an installed app exactly, and instead of reporting no results, Windows sends the query to Bing and fills the results with web links instead.

Try it yourself before making any changes: open the Start menu and type something like "wrd" or "painet." If you haven't disabled web search, you'll see a "Search the web" section appear, and hitting Enter will open Edge with a Bing search instead of Word or Paint.

It might benefit Microsoft, which is fine if you're Microsoft. For the rest of us, it's annoying. A couple of Settings tweaks handle most of it, and one registry edit finishes the job.

Here's what I changed, and why.

First, turn off cloud content and Search Highlights

An easy win that needs no registry work

Head into Settings > Privacy & security > Search permissions for your first couple of fixes.

Scroll down to Cloud content search and turn off Microsoft account and Work or School account. This should stop the Start menu from pulling results from OneDrive, Outlook, and your broader Microsoft account into local search. It won't get rid of Bing web suggestions, but it will remove a chunk of non-local results that can clutter your search results.

Just above those toggles is the Show search highlights toggle. That's the illustrated content Microsoft pulls from its servers showing holidays, trivia, and trending topics. It's a separate system from Bing results, so it has its own toggle here. Once you've done that, the search panel stops injecting this animated promo content into your Start menu search.

You can also get to this Settings page by clicking the taskbar search box, choosing the three-dot menu, and choosing Search settings.

For Bing suggestions, you still need a registry edit

The deeper fix for web results in the search box itself

Those toggles above handle cloud content, but they don't stop Bing web suggestions from appearing in the search box. For that, you'll need to head into the Registry Editor.

Before touching anything, though, create a System Restore point. Search for Create a restore point in the Start menu, select your system drive, click Configure to confirm protection is on, then click Create and name it something recognizable.

Once that's taken care of, hit Win + R, type regedit and hit Enter. Click Yes on the UAC prompt.

Navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SearchRight-click in the right pane, choose New > DWORD (32-bit) Value, and name it BingSearchEnabled. Double click that, and set the value to 0.

For 24H2 and later builds, also navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\ExplorerIf the Explorer key doesn't exist, you can right-click Windows, select New > Key, and name it Explorer. Then right-click in the right pane, create a new DWORD called DisableSearchBoxSuggestions and set that to 1. This disables both web results and search box suggestions in one fell swoop.

Once you've done all that, restart your PC, and then your PC will only return local apps, files, and settings, with no Bing links crowding the results. Windows 11 doesn't have an official Settings toggle for this yet, though maybe that will change in a future Insider build.

If you'd rather not touch the Registry, the same change is achievable via PowerShell in one line:

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search" -Name "BingSearchEnabled" -Value 0Either method works, and both are permanent until you manually reverse them.

Cut down the Recommended section

More pins, less Microsoft

While in Settings, you can take a look at the Recommended section of the Start menu. By default, this takes up roughly half of the Start menu, showing recently opened apps, recent files, and OneDrive content. If you already know what you want to launch, this section can feel a bit unnecessary.

To get rid of it, head to Settings > Personalization > Start. You can toggle off recently opened items in Start, jump lists, and File Explorer, as well as recently added apps. You can also change the layout to More Pins, which shrinks the Recommended section and gives more of the Start menu over to the apps you've actually pinned there.

Unfortunately, you can't fully remove the Recommended section on current stable builds, but you can shrink it and turn off its content sources. There are rumors of a full toggle to disable Recommended coming soon, but the above can get you most of the way there now.

The results are worth it

After I made these changes, the Start menu felt less like an advertisement for Bing and Microsoft and more of a basic app launcher. It's fast, prioritizes local results, and stops trying to trick me into launching trending web content with Edge. Of course if you really want to get rid of Start, you can use a third-party replacement, but if you've got a Start menu muscle memory like I do, these tips should help.