I've noticed that when searching for installed programs using the Start menu, it also shows related programs from the Microsoft Store. For example, if I type "mouse" to find Mouse Settings, it shows suggestions for related downloadable apps like Move Mouse. Similarly, searching for "RAID" brings up games like RAID: Shadow Legends and Tomb Raider. I spent quite a while looking through the settings for an Intune policy to stop these Store app recommendations but couldn't find anything. Does anyone know of a way to block these suggestions, either through Intune settings or a registry modification?
3 Answers
Setting the DWORD 32 bit value of 'BingSearchEnabled' to 0 will disable web search in the Start menu, but it doesn't resolve the issue the original poster mentioned. I'm also looking for a solution to stop those Store suggestions.
You can modify the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionSearch. There are a few 32-bit DWORDs you can adjust to improve your Start menu search experience, focusing it just on local machine searches. However, I can’t recall the exact DWORDs at the moment.
While I haven't looked into this deeply myself, I believe that if you're using Enterprise licensing, there's a way to specify which Microsoft Store apps are allowed. Even though my organization isn't using Intune, there should be a "Consumer Features: Block" option in the Device restrictions. If you want to go the Group Policy route, you could check under Windows Components -> Cloud Content to turn off Microsoft consumer features. Just a heads up though, this might be limited to Enterprise setups.
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