The fastest way to open something on Windows is to open the Start menu and type the name of the app or file. The exact item you’re looking for will appear, at which point you can press “enter.” Or at least, that’s how it used to work.
How to Fix Windows 11 Start Menu Not Working, Not Searching, Not Opening Issue (100% Working)
For years, Microsoft has pushed to slow down Start menu searches by offering “useful” information from the web. Now, some people may like this, but I personally would rather keep my web searches in the browser and use the Start menu to quickly find applications and files. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to disable web content in the Start menu, but it is possible with a registry tweak. We wrote about disabling this “feature” in Windows 10 back in 2020 . The process hasn’t changed for Windows 11, but let’s quickly refresh our memory.
To clarify, here's what it looks like if you type "why" into the start menu before this change:
And this is what it looks like afterwards:
