How to get rid of Windows 10 search web results triggered from the start menu

If you want to completely do away with Bing search in Start and get rid of the See web results entry and the entries under Search the web, you can accomplish this even in 2004 (and possibly newer versions) by User Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/File Explorer/Turn off display of recent search entries in the File Explorer search box group policy or setting DisableSearchBoxSuggestions DWORD32 value in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer to 1.

Ignore the name of the policy / registry entry and actually try it - you have to logout (or restart) afterwards to see the effect.

There are some side effects - the recent entries will be gone (also from File Explorer search), but if you want to have completely Bing-less Start menu search, this is the only way I know of in 2004.

So far, I only found one single way to block the search from happening, not disable it. I tested all the ways to disable the search that worked with non-final 2004 version, but seems MS disabled those too. The following blog post has a script that will create 2 firewall rules, for inbound and outbound connections, and it blocked the search in the Start Menu. Although you still see the search animation going on, it will be there for ~1s and then display the following message: Preview isn't available right now..

https://winaero.com/blog/disable-web-search-in-taskbar-in-windows-10-version-2004/