[novaleaf]

if you are searching for something for the first time (or after caching invalidates), it seems like it prioritizes search sources that have already completed.

on my computer, that means web-search almost always completes first. So most of the time if I type in something "new" and don't wait, it'll bring up Bing.

Sometimes it looks like "downloads folder" file search completes before Installed app search completes, because on one occasion I typed in an app's name and it launched the INSTALLER for the app.

once all the searchs resolve it behaves "as expected". I am very surprised if you don't have the same symptoms I'm describing. Why is your computer behaving different from every Win11 install I ever interact with?

[Rohansi]

I just tried a search for "downloads" and the first result was "Downloads folder privacy settings". I never search for that so it wasn't cached. I even pasted in the query to give it less time to search before pressing enter.

I don't think I've changed any settings for search. Everything is still enabled. There's over 250,000 items in the search index so I haven't removed indexed locations. My computer is pretty much a high-end gaming PC using last generation CPU and GPU. But really I've never seen this behavior anywhere - including my very basic laptop. Maybe I could see this happening on computers that are still using a HDD but I haven't tested that.

[novaleaf]

pretty weird, i have a few moderately high-end pc's and cheap laptops and they all have the same issues. Maybe me disabling a bunch of telemetry stuff screws up the caching.