If you were wondering whether or not the search bar (in the task bar) of Windows 10 phones home or not, by that meaning Microsoft listens to your every search request, you've got the answer this week.

One of their listening servers went down, and everyone in the world noticed that the search bar in Windows 10 did not work at all.

This was not due to a failed Windows update, and this did not get fixed with a Windows update. To fix it, Microsoft actually restarted their listening servers.

In fact, this piles up with a software programming mistake because when a server request goes unfulfilled, that should not have any effect on the local search that is performed as well.

Windows 10 listens to your every search request, even if you thought these were local search requests.

And god only knows what they do with it : law enforcements, spies, NSA, sabotage, espionage, marketing, profiling. You name it.

In other words, Windows 10 is not your friend. That is a tool for a third party. And it will stab you in the back in the long run.

Note, for most users, this is it, and there is no way around unless Microsoft is forced to by governements out there. Don't hold your breath, Microsoft should have brought to justice every single year and they have been brought just a couple of times.

For power users, you have this registry trick that disables the listening server lookup. Here it goes :

Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Software / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion / Search

On the right side, you've got a number of keys. Set the BingSearchEnabled key to 0. If this key does not exist, create it as a DWORD32 value and set it as 0.

Restart Explorer.exe (or reboot because restarting apps is now needlessly complicated and explorer.exe no longer restarts itself) and you're done.