Search applications when pressing Windows key?

In Windows 7/8/8.1 I would press the Start/Windows button and start typing the name of a program (ie: Firefox, Word, etc) and it would pop up, learn, and as I did the same thing in the future.....I would just press Windows key, type wor, and Word would pop up and I press enter. Don't need to take my hands off the keyboard.

Windows 10 does not do that. I type Word and get Wordpad. I type Firefox and get 'Download Firefox - Free web browser', Secure (for SecureCRT) give me 'SecureCRT (file folder)', even though these apps are installed. Is there a way to put the apps in the search?

Ensure Included Locations in Control Panel, Indexing Options includes Start Menu. Select Advanced, Rebuild to ensure the index is current and optimum.

No dice. Rebuilt it twice. This is going to bug me.

Windows does in fact do that... By default you get other search results as well, but if you have the app installed, it will show it in the search results. Are you using the latest version? Because there were a number of builds where this functionality did not work well.

Should be 10240.

Have no problem getting other search results. Just want the applications first. 7/8/8.1 were like that.

mvalpreda said:

Should be 10240.

Have no problem getting other search results. Just want the applications first. 7/8/8.1 were like that.

Well, don't know what to tell you, it works fine here. You may have to reinstall, which.. if you didn't save the esd file, might mean waiting until MS makes the ISO available.

See if this settings change helps.

Press the Taskbar Cortana search icon (magnifying glass) or however you normally launch Cortana, then
press the gear (settings) on the left hand side
Slide Search online and include web results to OFF

The results seem to be from the start menu, but I haven't tested an everywhere search yet. Still, it is better than getting web results when you only want results from your PC.

+edit
When I used Word as the search string this is what I got back - wordpad is first, but it also includes Word 2016 as the next result.

-edit

You can also navigate to the All users Start menu and pin the Win8 style search to Start or Taskbar ... for some reason though Windows keeps removing that icon.

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Search.lnk

Or.... paste the following into the Target field of the new shortcut.
%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe -sta {C90FB8CA-3295-4462-A721-2935E83694BA}

Turned off all that on Cortana and now going to rebuild the index. I would only get 'Desktop app' results and not get 'Apps' as an option.

Ok, just thought of something ... make sure that both the All Users Start menu is indexed (it should be), and your personal Start menu is indexed (usually not because it's in AppData)

So if the shortcuts applications you want to search (WinKey type name) are installed in your Start menu, they probably won't be found. You could look first (right click hte Start menu tile, select open file location) ... or ...

add
%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

to your index options. To use the new location sooner, rebuild the index, or wait a few hours and let the crawler pick up the new entries in it's rounds.

Everything I care about it is in %programdata%\microsoft\windows\start menu which appears to be in the indexing already.