Aside from being notorious for user privacy invasion (tracking and telemetry) and killing the Hard drives through extensive Read/Writes, the Windows 10 is a pretty decent operating system. Well, not really.
The guys at Microsoft are fond of shipping frequent Windows Updates to improve stability and security of OS. For most users, these updates are nightmares as there is no proper way to stop them unless you have Enterprise or LTSB version of Windows 10.
Just recently a background Windows 10 update broke the search bar functionality. Despite rebuilding the search index and cleaning the cache, it fails to work. The issue apparently affects the online searches but it prevents local files/apps from appearing. Don’t worry there is a simple fix available that will hardly take five minutes of your time.
How to Fix Windows 10 Search Not Working
Press WinKey+R, type “Regedit.exe” without quotes and press Enter.
Windows Registry Editor will open.
Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search
Look for “BingSearchEnabled”, if you don’t see it you will need to create it, just right click in a blank area and pick New DWORD 32 bit. Type in BingSearchEnabled
Double click on BingSearchEnabled and set it to 0 and press OK.
Do the same steps for CortanaConsent, if you don’t see it, create a DWORD 32 bit, again set it to 0.
Restart your PC so that the new changes take effect
The above step by step guide will help you fix Offline Searches not showing in Windows 10.
In most cases, rebooting the PC will fix most problems. Registry editing won’t be necessary.
