Windows 11 just got a number of great new additions with its latest version, although they have flown under the radar, because they are hidden and need to be enabled with a special configuration tool.
Newen (Opens in a new tab) I reported that PhantomOcean3, an enthusiastic Windows tester and leaker on Twitter, posted about the hidden search features that come with Windows 11 patch KB5022303 (which was just released for January).
It should come as no surprise, but you can enable new taskbar search and even new unannounced start menu search in .1105 with ViVeTool. This doesn’t mean you should, but you can 🙂 IDs: 40887771 to search the new taskbar, 38937525 to start the new search. You will also need 39281392 pic.twitter.com/dFjUH7uOqzJanuary 10, 2023
It consists of a search bar at the top of the Start menu, and a search box for the taskbar (Windows 10 style, as seen in Windows 11 preview builds already).
With the taskbar search box, not only can you enable this, but there are a few options available to choose from, such as having the full box or just an icon.
As mentioned, you won’t see these additional search functionality in Windows 11 because it’s behind the scenes. However, they can be enabled using the Windows ViVeTool configuration utility, as Neowin describes. However, you’d probably be better off not running these things just yet, as we’ll discuss later.
Analysis: Features are hidden for a reason
So why not turn on these search functions? For starters, you’ll need some technical knowledge to use ViVeTool (it’s not particularly difficult to turn on a hidden feature using the ID assigned to it in the tool, but less confident computing types might feel intimidated by the process).
On top of that, though, once these features are turned on, they can act weird and mess with your Windows 11 environment, which isn’t something you want on your main PC. Remember, these features are hidden for a reason – they aren’t ready to be released yet, and could cause problems. As PhantomOcean3 points out in its tweet, you might be able to get it to work, but that doesn’t mean you have to.
What this tells us is that Microsoft is most likely about to bring these features to Windows 11 soon. As always, though, there are no guarantees that anything in testing or still behind the scenes will make the final cut for inclusion in the OS.