WIN+"calc" opened up a Bing search for the term "calc" inside of Edge for me the other day. I imagine in a few more years that will actually be the expected behavior.

Try Win+R, "calc", OK. They haven't messed with the run dialog, so it still works like it did in Windows 95: quickly and reliably.

B-but Bing points! Support a charity or win Xbox with your aimless searches!

How to quickly open an app on Windows 10:

1. Hit Windows key and type name of the app. 2. Hit backspace until the app tops the result list instead of web results.

Does this make any sense? Nope...

counterpoint - maybe MS telemetry shows that people don't actually like to use apps in Windows 10 and thus it makes more sense to show web searches!

I was expecting that the application wouldn't appear at all, whatever they tried.

The number of common failure modes on the main interaction the Windows DE supports (that is opening the start menu and launching a program) is just incredible.

Which is why I disable web search on the group policy panel.

This should be the default behavior.

Surely MS could look at their telemetry data they collect on absolutely everything and tell what people are disabling or otherwise modifying. The default of course will be "person does nothing" because most people have an adversarial relationship with their technology -- it must do what they want or they work around / cease to use it.

Then Bing would loose out on all that accidental traffic that still counts as traffic for selling ads.

Is the start menu listening to that setting again? I had to block it in the firewall.