Your taskbar search must work considerably better than mine. It's a complete crapshoot what it'll decide to find if I'm not super careful and let it finish loading. Hence why I'm still a user of Classic Shell.

I observe the same. Determinism is quite important to get things done quickly. Instead, typing "expl" gives me a lottery between Internet Explorer and whatever their file manager is called.

The one that REALLY gets me is search for "Windows Update".

If I do it too quickly, it can't find the update control panel and I end up with an Edge window searching Bing for "Windows update"

I think the key is to turn off Cortana and all the internet searching stuff. If I want to search the internet, I'll use a browser.