New Windows 10 Insider Preview Build Separates Cortana from Search

As has long been rumored, Microsoft is taking steps to extricate its digital personal assistant from Windows 10’s core search functionality. And a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build, just released today, provides our first peek at this separation.

“Going forward, we’ll be decoupling Search and Cortana in the taskbar,” Microsoft’s Dona Sarkar explains. “This will enable each experience to innovate independently to best serve their target audiences and use cases.”

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

In case anyone is interested in me reading between the lines here, there’s long been tension between the Windows team and Cortana, which is developed separately in a different part of the company. That makes some sense, since Cortana capabilities can and should pop up in many places throughout the Microsoft ecosystem. But it has also led to issues between the two teams, which have moved forward in different directions and at different times.

“Search and Cortana settings have also now been split between the two, along with the familiar group policies,” Sarkar continues. “This change is one of several we’ve made throughout this release to improve your experience in this space, including updating the search landing page design, enhancing your search results, and integrating Microsoft To-Do with Cortana.”

Also new in build 18317 are:

Improved Start reliability. The Start menu is being separated from ShellExperienceHost.exe into its own process, called StartMenuExperienceHost.exe. “This has a number of benefits, including simplifying debugging and insulating Start from potential issues impacting other surfaces,” Sarkar writes.

Improved font management. You can now install fonts by dragging and dropping them from File Explorer into Settings > Fonts (just as you could before when fonts were managed in File Explorer). You can also uninstall fonts from here.

Simpler Windows Insider Program settings. The Windows Insider Program settings page in Settings > Update & Security > Windows Insider Program is now much simpler looking but provides the same enroll/unenroll functionality as before.

Beyond that, there are a number of general changes, improvements, and fixes, in particular for the Windows Console.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 26 comments

  • Maktaba

    16 January, 2019 - 2:04 pm

    <p>It’s a shame you can’t search inside OneNote notes from the taskbar (I mean notes from notebooks stored online on OneDrive, not just local notebooks)</p>

  • CaedenV

    16 January, 2019 - 2:10 pm

    <p>sweet! Maybe now when I do 'check for updates' it will actually open settings and search for updates rather than a clueless web search if I type too fast!</p>

    • warren

      16 January, 2019 - 5:26 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#397332"><em>In reply to CaedenV:</em></a></blockquote><p><br></p><p>You don't really need to do that anymore. In 2018 they brought back the tray notification icon for when there are updates that are ready to install. </p><p><br></p><p>Also, doing "Check for Updates" manually will invite Windows Update to download and install the preview for next month's quality updates. You probably don't want that. </p>

  • prjman

    16 January, 2019 - 2:10 pm

    <p>Just kill Cortana already. Jeesh</p><p><br></p>

    • nickysreensaver

      Premium Member
      16 January, 2019 - 2:31 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#397333">In reply to prjman:</a></em></blockquote><p>actually please dont… cause I still use my invoke all the time and it's great. Just because it's not popular doesn't mean it should be killed.</p>

      • jrh

        Premium Member
        16 January, 2019 - 2:34 pm

        <blockquote><em><a href="#397336">In reply to nickysreensaver:</a></em></blockquote><p>I second that</p>

    • misterstuart

      Premium Member
      16 January, 2019 - 2:53 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#397333">In reply to prjman:</a></em></blockquote><p>I love Cortana with my Invoke. Actually, I use Cortana, Alexa, and Google in my home and can honestly say that Cortana is my favorite one in terms of how the voice sounds and the quality of the Invoke speaker. It doesn't have all of the commands as the other two, but it's nicer to use IMO. </p>

      • bleeman

        Premium Member
        17 January, 2019 - 12:41 pm

        <blockquote><a href="#397343"><em>In reply to misterstuart</em></a></blockquote><blockquote>I use both Alexa and Cortana in my home and like you agree that I like the Cortana experience the best. I've often found I get better search results from Cortana as well over Alexa.</blockquote><p><br></p>

  • karlinhigh

    Premium Member
    16 January, 2019 - 2:16 pm

    <p>Will they be separating web search from local search so start menu search doesn't get me movie posters from the web instead of My Documents contents?</p>

  • ggolcher

    Premium Member
    16 January, 2019 - 2:53 pm

    <p>The blog post says: "<span style="color: rgb(95, 94, 94);">We have locked down the inbox apps in 19H1. These “lite” versions of the inbox apps are what will ship with 19H1 when it is released.</span>"</p><p><br></p><p>It would be amazing, just amazing, if MS actually locked-down a build in terms of features one month earlier and dedicated one full month extra to bug-fixing before widespread release.</p><p><br></p><p>I really hope that statement alludes to an earlier lock-down date , it may seriously have a positive impact on release quality.</p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">(We may never know, Microsoft is terrible communicating decisions like these)</span></p>

  • krabago

    Premium Member
    16 January, 2019 - 3:11 pm

    <p>Still no sign of Sets. Anyone know what's going on with Sets? </p>

    • coreyp

      16 January, 2019 - 6:09 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#397347">In reply to krabago:</a></em></blockquote><p>A good alternative to Sets is Groupy by Stardock. I've been using it for a while now and it works great </p>

  • Dan1986ist

    Premium Member
    16 January, 2019 - 3:29 pm

    <p>I got the separated Cortana and Search in Build 18312, and prefer that way. Also, wonder if this could mean a choice of whether one wants to use Cortana, Alexa, or whatever. </p>

  • robincapper

    16 January, 2019 - 3:39 pm

    <p>Be nice to see them address more parts of the world which don't even have Cortana…</p>

  • Winner

    16 January, 2019 - 5:02 pm

    <p>I'm waiting for them to decouple reboots from the updates.</p><p>Today was another day where I go to my left-on work machine to find it has rebooted and all my open stuff has to be relaunched and autorecovered. The problem with Win 10 is that you can't leave your desk occupied with open work overnight or it may get trashed. For the first 30 years of my GUI experiences, that wasn't a problem.</p>

  • sevenacids

    16 January, 2019 - 7:22 pm

    <p>I hope this means one can safely remove Cortana from the system without breaking Search.</p>

  • drprw

    Premium Member
    16 January, 2019 - 8:09 pm

    <p>I hope the "improved start reliability" bit actually works. I had to buy Start10 from Stardock on my Surface 2017 because the start menu keeps resetting. I've done everything I can find (creating a new user and all) and the start menu resets itself eventually back to the app/game garbage menu that is provided in a fresh install of Windows 10.</p>

  • SupaPete

    16 January, 2019 - 8:19 pm

    <p>I don't really care whether MS separates Cortana and search, i hardly ever use Cortana (knowingly/intentionally), so i don't mind much about it.</p><p>What really annoys me though is when there is now an additional not removable icon on the taskbar because i already have too few space on the taskbar.</p><p><br></p><p>I don't get why MS doesn't finally improve the taskbar properly.</p><p>So like on mac dock one could have as many icons there as one wants and they then just scale smaller to fit in. </p><p>Much better than that nonsense windows does where it adds paging, like yeah, totally, i want to click through multiple pages forth and back each time i want to get to an icon on a different page.</p><p><br></p><p>I hope they finally bring the taskbar functionality to macOS dock functionality level in 2019, it's about time.</p>

    • charlesverrier

      21 January, 2019 - 5:10 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#397437">In reply to SupaPete:</a></em></blockquote><p>The current Cortana icon can be removed from the taskbar (I don't think there's a suggestion they'll change this?) – It's a routine change I make for our office PCs, as Cortana is of no value in a work environment. I also remove the Task View icon, as again my experience is that users just get lost and log more support calls.</p>

  • evictedkoala

    16 January, 2019 - 8:56 pm

    <p>Corporate statements and such should really limit the term 'innovate'. It loses its meaning when it's used in ridiculously simple cases like this. Anyone who cares to read these articles is intelligent enough to see through the flowery distraction attempt and it makes them look pathetic.</p>

    • charlesverrier

      21 January, 2019 - 5:12 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#397439">In reply to evictedkoala:</a></em></blockquote><p>Yes – that and Microsoft's recent odd obsession with calling everything an 'experience'.</p>

  • wbhite

    Premium Member
    17 January, 2019 - 8:27 am

    <p><strong>"</strong><strong style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Improved Start reliability."</strong></p><p><br></p><p>Does this mean that I won't have to wait 1-3 seconds for the Start menu to appear when I click it? Happens on every Windows 10 device I've used.</p>

    • IanYates82

      Premium Member
      17 January, 2019 - 9:12 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#397506">In reply to wbhite:</a></em></blockquote><p>I get that on mine a bit too.</p><p><br></p><p>I can see that in task manager, the shell experience host gets suspended, as it should. It's just the wake-up bit that can take a moment, particularly if the RAM contents it had suspended needs to come from disk, or if other contents of your RAM needs to go to disk first.</p>

      • IanYates82

        Premium Member
        17 January, 2019 - 9:14 pm

        <blockquote><em><a href="#397651">In reply to IanYates82:</a></em></blockquote><p>Ahh – I see in their notes that they're separating Start from the other host process that gets suspended. That should make a huge difference.</p>

  • JosephDickerson

    17 January, 2019 - 2:43 pm

    <p>This and taking Cortana out of the setup UI pretty much means Cortana is dead. Well, she will still be in the Halo games…</p>

  • jdawgnoonan

    20 January, 2019 - 7:47 pm

    <p>I am not sure why Microsoft thinks a big text box on the Taskbar is a good idea. Fortunately it is easy to get rid of and hopefully it stays that way, but it is always irritating to see it in screenshots or on any machine I see where it has not been removed. </p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC