I have a similar but unrelated problem. The searching seems to be... non-deterministic or something, it's weird. Like if I'm after a program, let's call it "uniquator". That program may be the first suggestion for "uni", but after q another random program, or search suggestion, or some Store shovelware would be the top suggestion.

It doesn't sound annoying, but it means you often hit enter mid-typing, only for the top suggestion to change right as you are hitting enter.

This is a common autocomplete/top-result UX mistake. If typing a substring of X autocompletes to X, then typing more of that substring of X, contiguously, must also autocomplete to X. This is a no-brainer (having the result change before you can stop yourself from hitting enter is easily one of the most frustrating things in all UX). However, it seems like people implementing clever auto-complete rules just don't care (I absolutely refuse to believe it's ignorance - it's impossible to be unaware of this problem if you're implementing autocomplete).

I assume the issue is poor decision making about rule conflicts. E.g., what's higher priority: Consistency, or exact-match? E.g. if "photo" auto-completes to "Photoshop", should "photos" auto-complete to "Photoshop" or "Photos"? I think it's "obvious" that consistency is more important here. If the user wants "Photos" despite opening "Photoshop" more often, let them configure the search explicitly to prioritize it, or allow them to select from a list of multiple matches.

And that's just a comparison against a single conflicting rule. Now imagine all the obscure rules they've implemented, for reasons varying from a misguided drive for "features" to nefariously pushing the user to click on what they want them to.

>E.g. if "photo" auto-completes to "Photoshop", should "photos" auto-complete to "Photoshop" or "Photos"? I think it's "obvious" that consistency is more important here.

Regardless of what you want the behaviour to be, the behaviour shouldn't be, as it is on my system:

"pho" = Photos

"photo" = Photoshop

"photos" = Photos

And as I type this to confirm what happens after, now "photos" completed to photoshop, despite not selecting anything since the last time I typed it...

There is a good reason why I use either the Powertoys Run or Launchy on every system I touch.

This is a big issue with a lot of ML algorithms - it causes issues with consistency. Prioritising apps in auto complete search should be done with a simple tally of how many times the user has opened the program, perhaps as a rolling n days or something. Either way, that causes consistency. If you have some ML algorithm that takes into account how long the window of the app has been visible or in focus or a bunch of other weird features will cause poor UX the moment the baby projectile vomits across the room while the dog has diarrhea that the robot vaccuum spread all over the room. Suddenly you have some esoteric app called PhotosResizer2000 stay in focus for 8 hours while you deal with the emergency from which point onward the ML algorithm will suggest this app whenever you start to type Pho...

> I assume the issue is poor decision making about rule conflicts. E.g., what's higher priority: Consistency, or exact-match? E.g. if "photo" auto-completes to "Photoshop", should "photos" auto-complete to "Photoshop" or "Photos"?

I suspect it's even worse than this. It seems to be something along the lines of "oh you typed pho, and got photoshop, but then typed t, so clearly photoshop wasn't what you wanted, since we already suggested that"

That's the only way I can explain windows "flip between several app suggestions every time a new letter is typed" behavior

I assumed it was a simple race condition. when I type "about" + enter, half the time I get my computers specs, and half the time it vomits up something regarding java.

An even more infuriating effect I got is when I make typo during search. For example, I might want to launch League of Legends. I press super key, enter "Leageu of", see right logo, press enter, but instead of launching the entry that it definitely knows about, it will start a bing search, with my typo corrected. In edge of course, because we cannot change that as well. Thanks, microsoft.

Ah yes ! Nothing better to start the day than to type "term", Terminal appears furtively, "i" Enter.

"Would you like to make edge your default browser ?" No !!

"3 results for termi - bing"

I've seen that too in Win10, with several different apps with different names. The 'terminal' for example, s.t. some other gizzy (web page? I don't know) instead of the terminal, which I use ever day (so it's not like what comes up first is your most frequently used app whose name begins with the letters you've typed so far). Extremely annoying, have to wait until it settles and hope that you can cursor down (or up) to the app you really want.

I was frustrated with it as well. I turned to Power Toys Run and never use the default search anymore.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run

Powertoys is terrific, and open Source!

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/blob/main/README.md

For the fastest searching possible on Windows, I use the Journal-indexing "Everything" search.

https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

Why is this not the default in Windows?! I've been looking for something like this since I installed Windows 10

> Why is this not the default in Windows?!

Because Microsoft is a giant dysfunctional bureaucracy and getting anything approved within the org takes ten years of meetings and tons of political capital. Whereas a non-Windows side project can run under the radar and just make cool stuff.

That’s interesting, search for me was significantly worse on windows 10.

Counterpoint - I don't have this issue, it's nice and snappy for me, without even any registry tweaks to disable web search (though now that you mention it, I should).

I've heard it improved with Windows 11. It used to be the one think I pointed to when talking about the downward trajectory of Windows.

I actually don't have this issue.

Seems like a lot of things can cause this issue, additional hard-drives that are in sleep state, networked drives in sleep, internet search.

It's actually a tough design choice with any multi-channel search: Do you start displaying results from the first sources available or do you wait until all sources have reported in?

If you wait you get latency, but if you try to stream results the order/top result can change which is jarring to the user and creates UX race conditions.

It should be a non issue.

Index the installed apps in the start menu search and make these appear in the search result.

I want to be able to press Win-key -> type "fi" -> press nter to open Firefox. On MacOS and all Linux distros I`ve every tried, it works flawlessly.

For other (more advanced) search mechanisms, implement these in a designated search option in the taskbar, startmenu, standalone etc.

This means that Microsoft needs to abandon Bing and whatever telemetry they can gather from the user in the start menu search making this unlikely to be the reality going forward.

Can't they just upload the search asynchronously? Why do they have to block the user?

Funnily enough, on iOS the default behavior is to do a web search - luckily it's possible to disable.

You return whatever results you can before the user perceives a delay. If you think a web search or slower search is useful (it isn't) then add a button to expand the search such as "Search the web for ${search term}" or "Continue this search in Explorer".

mulmen's laws of UX design:

1. It is never ok for the user to perceive input delay.

2. There must be no compromise in service of law #1.

3. Your UX improvement is a regression until proven otherwise.

4. To change the UX you must first destroy something you love.

5. The CPU belongs to the user, not to you.

"before the user perceives a delay": I agree with you.

For any UX/UI designer out there a delay is perceived when it is greater than 200ms. Those are milliseconds.

> For any UX/UI designer out there a delay is perceived when it is greater than 200ms. Those are milliseconds.

Delay is perceptible at around 10ms, and considered tolerable for generic apps (not realtime games, obviously) to about 100ms, and that's been established for quite a long time. 200ms is...too much.

>Do you start displaying results from the first sources available or do you wait until all sources have reported in?

In the strongest possible sense: Neither, ever. You can not treat instant results and un-cacheable delayed results of unknown quantity/size as the same element of UI. It's a fallacious premise. (Sorry to sound aggressive.)

Microsoft developers found a way to do it, without having to make any compromises or impact user-visible performance in any way.

Their brilliant trick to achieving this -- wait for it, it's so simple -- was nothing more than simply... sitting in the same building that Bing is served from! With a mere 1ms latency over 100 Gbps fibre from their office to the Bing servers, there's no pesky latency or packet loss to interfere with the instantaneous UX response times and deterministic behaviour.

Those pesky users are just "whining" and need to learn to sit at Redmond, just like they do.