How to Disable Bing in the Windows 11 Start Menu
Like its predecessors, Windows 11 integrates the Bing search directly into the start menu. Every time you search for an application, file or folder, you also search Bing. There’s not even an option to turn it off in the Settings app. Luckily, you can do this with a registry hack.
Warning: Remember that you must be careful whenever you edit the Windows registry. Arbitrarily changing values or deleting registry keys can render programs or Windows itself unstable or inoperable. Follow the instructions carefully.
You can edit the registry manually if you’re comfortable with it, or you can use our pre-made REG files which will handle it automatically.
Disable Bing using the registry editor
Disabling Bing using the Registry Editor (Regedit) is pretty easy. Unlike some registry hacks, this one only requires changing a single value.
Click the Start button, type “regedit” in the search bar, and then click “Open” or press Enter.
You need to navigate to:
Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows
Note: If there is a key called “Explorer” under the “Windows” key, you don’t need to try to create another one. Just skip ahead to the “Create a DWORD to disable Bing” section.
Right-click Windows, hover over New, then click Key. Type “explorer” in the name field and press Enter when done.
If you did everything correctly, you should see the following:
Create a DWORD to disable Bing
We need to create a new DWORD, that’s just a type of data that you can put in a registry key. Right-click the Explorer registry key, hover over New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value.
Once you create a DWORD, it will be automatically selected and you can enter a name. name it DisableSearchBoxSuggestions.
Double-click DisableSearchBoxSuggestions, set the value to 1, then click OK.
After creating the DWORD and setting its value, you need to restart Explorer.exe. If you don’t want to do this manually, you can simply restart your PC.
TIED TOGETHER: How to restart Windows Explorer.exe (along with the taskbar and start menu)
Disable Bing with our registry hack
Dealing with the registry can be tedious. If you don’t want to do it yourself, we’ve created two .reg files that handle everything automatically. One of them, “Disable Bing Searchs.reg” disables Bing search. The other restores Bing search to the start menu if you decide you want it back.
Disable Bing in the Start menu
Note: Normally you should not trust random REG files that you download from the internet. You should open a REG file in a plain text editor and check if it’s safe.
Open the ZIP file with any file archiving program. If you don’t have one, don’t worry — Windows 11 can open ZIP files natively, without third-party apps.
TIED TOGETHER: The best file archiving utility for Windows
Double-click the .reg file named Disable Bing Searches.reg.
You will receive a pop-up warning that REG files may be harmful to your computer – go ahead and click Yes.
Then all you have to do is restart Explorer.exe. You can manually restart it in Task Manager if you want, but restarting your entire computer will do the same thing. You will have a Bing-free Start Menu once the reboot is complete.