The video's fix is perfect for one PC. An office needs the same switch thrown once, centrally, in a way that survives updates and shows up in an audit. That is what Group Policy is for — here is the deployment, done properly.
If you look after more than a handful of PCs, you already know the failure mode of per-machine tweaks: applied unevenly, forgotten, and quietly undone by the next feature update. This guide takes the video's goal — local-only Windows Search — and delivers it the fleet way, through the documented Search policy, with piloting and verification treated as part of the fix rather than paperwork after it.
Running the video's registry script machine by machine is fine for three PCs and a poor plan for thirty. The per-user value it sets works, but nothing protects it — a feature update can reset it, a user with admin rights can undo it, and you have no central record of which machines have it. Group Policy inverts all three weaknesses: the setting is defined once, applied by Windows itself at every policy refresh, visible in one console, and it survives the updates that keep washing the manual tweak away. For an office, web results in search are also a small data-governance question — staff queries, including internal file and project names, leaving the network to Bing — which is another reason the decision belongs in policy, not in per-PC folklore.
gpupdate /force on a test machine, then verify with gpresult /r that the GPO applied — and confirm in the Start panel that web results are gone.The same setting written directly as a machine policy is ConnectedSearchUseWeb set to 0 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search — the route to use when you manage machines through an imaging or configuration tool rather than a domain. Pilot first: link the GPO to one test OU for a few days, because policy that touches every search box in the building deserves a soak period before it goes fleet-wide.
Three things experience teaches. First, document the why in the GPO's comment — six months later, "search feels different" tickets land faster when the reason (speed, clutter, query privacy) is written down. Second, expect the exception requests: a couple of staff genuinely use web answers in the panel, and the grown-up answer is that their browser does the same job one click away. Third, policy editions matter: gpedit.msc itself needs Windows Pro, Education or Enterprise on the machine being managed, and a few search policies are only fully honoured on Enterprise and Education SKUs — test on your actual fleet image rather than assuming. The per-user registry value remains the fallback for Home-edition machines that policy cannot reach.
The video shows the quick script on one machine — this page scales that same change to the whole office.
▶️ Watch Full VideoYes, two ways. Set the same policy in each machine's local Group Policy editor (gpedit.msc, Pro and above), or write the machine policy value ConnectedSearchUseWeb = 0 under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search using whatever imaging or remote-management tool you already have. A domain simply makes it central.
That is precisely its advantage. Group Policy is reapplied by Windows at every refresh cycle, so even if an update disturbs local state, the policy asserts itself again. Preference-style registry values set by a script have no such guardian, which is why the manual fix occasionally needs reapplying.
No. This policy governs only the Windows Search box and Start panel. Browsers keep whatever search engine they are configured with — if you want to govern that too, it is a separate browser policy, managed separately.