Windows 11, farewell to web searches: Microsoft confirms they can be disabled

Microsoft has officially confirmed the arrival of the operating system Windows 11 version 26H2, releasing the new build 26300.8697 in the Insider experimental channel for performance testing. Last week, the company from Redmond published technical details for system administrators, explaining that the update will be distributed via an enablement package eKB on top of the Windows 11 25H2 framework. Among the new features in this version, the company validated the introduction of one of the most requested characteristics by the community.

Local files are prioritized in the new search updates. Also if you want you can turn off web suggestions entirely.

--- March Rogers (@marchr)
June 15, 2026

March Rogers, Partner Director of Design at Microsoft, highlighted some improvements related to search that the company is testing internally. During a series of interactions with users on the social platform X, Rogers confirmed ongoing work to disable web search results within the Windows search tool. This is behavior that many users find annoying, as the operating system frequently suggests links to Bing considered useful, instead of showing the application or exact object they are trying to locate on the PC.

Activation Process via ViveTool

The focus of searches therefore shifts to finding local files rather than web content. The distribution of the new option is not immediate for everyone, as new features remain initially accessible only to a small circle of testers. Enthusiast phantomofearth, who analyzes the released builds, has identified the necessary identifiers to unlock these latent options, through which immediate activation of features intended for Windows 11 26H2 can be forced.

To enable the new Search experience you'll need several IDs:
61267302, 61344081, 61482515, 61532758, 61760679
Make sure 48433719 is enabled (should be enabled on most Experimental installs already) if this doesn't work.
--- phantomofearth ? (@phantomofearth)
June 20, 2026

To configure the new search experience on build 26300.8697, you will need to perform some technical steps on your computer. The first step requires downloading the utility called ViveTool directly from GitHub, then decompressing the files into a folder that is easy to locate on the hard drive. Next, you should press the Win + X key combination on the keyboard and select the Terminal (Admin) option.
Once the Windows Terminal is open, you need to switch to the Command Prompt profile. This can be done by pressing the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + 2 or by clicking the downward-facing arrow located at the top of the window. In the prompt, you need to navigate to the folder containing the extracted application files using the command CD. If the files are located in the path C:\Vive, the command to type is CD C:\Vive.
Then, you need to enter the string vivetool /enable /id: followed by the actual ID that unlocks the features in the command line and press the Enter key. This is done for a total of five IDs: 61267302, 61344081, 61482515, 61532758, 61760679. The operation requires a restart of the computer to make the changes to the operating system effective. If you wish to revert and restore the original configuration of Windows, simply repeat the sequence replacing the /enable command with /disable during the procedure.

The benefits of this modification reflect on the overall performance of the user interface, with the removal of web results effectively reducing the system's workload. The search tool in Windows 11 becomes significantly snappier once this type of bloatware is removed, in short.