Last Updated on October 12, 2021 by Mathew Diekhake
The search field you get in Windows’ taskbar is about locating information that’s already on your PC: opening files, finding apps instead of navigating around Windows, and so forth. Microsoft is now expanding on that experience by personalizing it to include direct access to your contacts and data you would expect to find from your work cloud.
Microsoft Search is going to be available from the taskbar but also the home page of Microsoft Office, Outlook, Sharepoint, OneDrive, and the Bing search engine. Any place where there is an existing search field available you can use to bring up the new personalized experience. While that might take some getting used to, the apps that have never shown a search field before will give most people an immediate understanding of what’s available, like when you head over to Microsoft Office.
Microsoft thrives in the enterprise in comparison to other operating systems, and that’s where Microsoft Search is aimed at most, by offering a unified and consistent search experience that evolves the definition of search in the enterprise. With it, you can have Microsoft Search anticipating the needs of where you’re working, get answers and insights for your workflow, have a natural language understanding, and instant query predictions.
If the expansion of search has you concerned about privacy, don’t worry: you still have all the same privacy and security controls that come with Microsoft Office 365. The security will also reflect any changes to your information that may happen over time.
Microsoft Search was initially announced seven months ago now but is now being introduced alongside Microsoft Build 2019.
Source: Welcome to Microsoft Search, intelligent search for the modern workplace – Microsoft Tech Community