The search box on my Taskbar has vanished and I’m confused about how I’m supposed to do searches on my PC now. How can I get it to reappear as I find it quite useful?
It’s a bit odd that your search box just spontaneously disappeared, so the first thing I’d do is run an anti-virus scan to ensure nothing else is awry on your computer. On the presumption that you’re not infected by some malware (and it would be a bit peculiar for malware to change what’s on your Taskbar) the next possibility is that you either accidentally disabled it or that a program you ran disabled it. Either way, it’s pretty easy to restore that searchbox on your Taskbar in Windows 11 so there’s no reason to stress out.
However, you don’t actually need a search box on the Taskbar to be able to easily access the powerful Windows search feature! It’s at the very top of the launch menu that you probably fire up dozens of times each day. Not only that, but you can also use the Windows key + S shortcut to launch search too!
THE SEARCH BOX ATOP THE START MENU
Remember the Start screen from the first iteration of Windows 11? Yeah, I didn’t much like it either. When that was shrunk down to be more like the venerable Windows 10 Start menu, it actually picked up a tremendously useful feature: A search box on the very top of the window. Here, check it out:
I surmise that long-time Windows users don’t even see this search box, actually! Now you know it’s there, however, along with that Windows + S shortcut, you can manage without the search box on the Taskbar (as shown above). Or… we can restore it. Let’s do that.
RESTORE SEARCH BOX TO TASKBAR
In that search box, search for “search taskbar” and you’ll be directed to exactly the right spot in the System Settings area, complete with a handy shortcut:
Click on the “Open” link, or the icon above “Controls visibility of Search on the taskbar via combo box” and you’ll be whisked to the Personalization area, specifically to the many Taskbar settings and preferences:
There are a lot of options to consider here, and each is immediately applied on your actual Taskbar so you can see how it being enabled or disabled affects your user experience. Click on “Hide” adjacent to the “Search” field and you’ll see that there are actually four possible settings:
Let’s compare the different possibilities…
SEARCH BOX ON TASKBAR OPTIONS
The first option is “Hide” and you’ve already seen that: It’s just completely missing. Handy if you have lots of icons on the Taskbar, but it can be disconcerting if you’re used to a search box being present.
Search icon only, as shown above, adds a magnifying lens, making it far more compact but still visible so you don’t have to remember keyboard shortcuts or similar.
Search icon and label offers up what appears to be a search box with the word “Search” within, but it’s actually just a button that launches the search window. Still, much easier to navigate and you don’t then have to remember that the magnifying lens icon is the search utility.
Or… you might just want to go back to the classic Search box, which is what’s shown above. Me? I actually really like “Search icon and label” because it’s big enough and recognizable enough to get me to the search feature quickly, but not so big that it eats up a lot of the Taskbar real estate. Which one’s your favorite now that you know how to switch it up?
Pro tip: I’ve been writing about Microsoft Windows for many years. Please check out my extensive and well-documented Windows help area for over 1,000 useful tutorials while you’re visiting the site!