For the past couple of days, my laptop’s search bar has been broken, just returning a blank box and no results, which has been driving me nuts.  For some reason, not quite nuts enough to Google for a solution, but then one came up randomly in my Twitter feed…

If your Windows 10 start menu search bar is broken, this fix worked for me. Instead of rebooting you can just restart explorer.exe.
To apply fix automatically, you can use this: https://t.co/Smum3CMDQg https://t.co/ij74IIcUna

— MalwareTech (@MalwareTechBlog) February 6, 2020

First you need to open up the text editor of your choice, and copy and paste the following lines of code…

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search]
"CortanaConsent"=dword:00000000
"BingSearchEnabled"=dword:00000000

Save this as “FixSearch.reg”.  Obviously the name can be whatever you want, but the “.reg” is important.  This will make the file a “Registration Entries” file.

Now you’ve saved the file, double click to run it in the registry editor, which will make the important changes that will fix the problem.  These are to switch off “Cortana Consent” and “Bing Search Enabled” features.

You can do it manually, by opening the Registry Editor, finding the key above and changing the values.  But it’s easier to just double click a file, right?

Anyway, your mileage may vary, but this worked for me.