The plan is to make searches even more difficult instead of only searching email, search results will also include “calendar events, files, and commands.” It starts with top search results “based on the most relevant information in your mailbox,” but that’s not all. It’s a continuation of Microsoft’s plan to muck up searches in Windows. “O nce you enter the full keyword search query, Outlook curates the results based on the most relevant information in your mailbox and puts those on top of the returned results followed by results in chronological order (Today, Yesterday etc).” Among other things, Microsoft threatened promised to move the Search bar to the top of the Outlook window instead of above the message list, and issued this warning: In November 2019, Microsoft posted a description of upcoming changes to searches in Outlook that perhaps led to the unwelcome appearance of “Top results” recently. If you’re not seeing “Top updates,” then don’t worry about it.Īpparently, this isn’t new – there have been complaints about “Top results” for two years. Perhaps a default was changed in some recent update. I don’t recall seeing “top results” until a couple of weeks ago, and I do searches in Outlook for email every day. Three messages were chosen as “top results” – two from a couple of weeks ago, and one from February. Take a look at the dates of the messages in the screenshot above. If “Top results” is turned on, the first three results will be out of order.

Check the box “Don’t show top results.” Hang on, go back. In webmail (both and Office 365 webmail), click on Settings / View all Outlook settings / General / Search. Uncheck the box “Show most relevant search results on top.”

In the desktop program, click on File / Options / Search.

If you’re getting “Top results” and you don’t like them either, you can disable them. I kind of want to throw it back at the Microsoft engineers working on searches these days. At the moment, the three “Top results” appear to be chosen by a roomful of monkeys throwing dung at the screen. Well, it’s supposed to be smart algorithms. When you search your email in Outlook, you might see three messages chosen as “Top results” by sophisticated AI & machine learning algorithms.

Change outlook back to hotmail 2017