It's more of intranet plus internet search. It may appear like filesystem but that is because it's searching internal services like SharePoint to the company that has chosen this integration.

It's also not mixed in, last I remember using this feature it was displayed in a banner section and made it really obvious these results came from a different sources.

Yup - Microsoft employee here but unaffiliated with that team. I love it, frankly. For large orgs that have thousands of SharePoint sites going back years(1), it's pretty fantastic. What would have been a dozen emails across two days to find some random doc explaining how to do something is now five to ten minutes of poking things into Bing.

1. TAM for this may be on the order of triple digits only for all I know, but if you work in a 50k+ knowledge worker org it's great.

Customer here... and, frankly, I hate it...

Now, not only is Microsoft weaponizing windows updates... they are weaponizing Office to push services without being asked?

I detest these dark patterns and decisions.

It's amazing how a company can make so many good decisions (IE: Open Source direction of .net) while also making such detestable decisions.

This may be difficult to grasp. But likely where you are seeing this feature is in a corporate setting where you are the "end user", not the paying customer. The corporate entity that is making use of this feature is who you should be protesting the use to, not Microsoft.

There's nothing "difficult to grasp" - these are shit decisions and dark patterns.

A feature that's MAYBE useful in a corporate setting to a hand full of people should not be a default defacto setting forced upon EVERYONE.

The issue isn't the feature... it's the default settings that enable invasive features.

is it the default to everyone or just o365 customers with intranet search content indexed?

Still no reason to force-push this onto users. If you are going to set up and maintain SharePoint servers and what not, you can surely change that browser preference yourselves, no?

Isn't it just a way to snoop on our file system searches? Oops, you were searching for a personal file but your query got sent to our server instead.

Isn't the point of this finding your personal file stored in the server?