<story><title>Cortana is really bad</title><url>https://medium.com/@johndavidback/cortana-is-really-really-bad-6ca96733ef4d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fpgaminer</author><text>See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft&amp;#x27;s name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something.  Now everything is starting to make sense.  I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10.  I&amp;#x27;d type &amp;quot;remov&amp;quot; and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications.  Great.  But if I accidentally finished and typed &amp;quot;remove&amp;quot; the result would disappear.  I felt like I was going crazy or something.  Comforting to know everyone is having similar problems ... though still just as bewildering as to why it&amp;#x27;s happening in the first place.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s weird that there are no great &amp;quot;magic search&amp;quot; tools on any desktop environment I&amp;#x27;ve used.  Windows 7 is close, but doesn&amp;#x27;t include any fancy results (can&amp;#x27;t have it do quick math, etc).  Mac&amp;#x27;s Spotlight gets everything right, except it won&amp;#x27;t open a new window if I type, say, &amp;quot;firefox&amp;quot;.  It&amp;#x27;ll just pull up a window I already have open (no way to change that behavior without weird hacks).  Unity&amp;#x27;s gets confused and breaks too often.  Cinnamon&amp;#x27;s sorts results alphabetically.  Gnome&amp;#x27;s is fairly close to ideal, though it forgets launch history too quickly (if I type &amp;quot;calc&amp;quot; and select LibreOffice&amp;#x27;s Calc just _once_ it&amp;#x27;ll start showing that first, instead of Calculator which I want 95% of the time when typing &amp;quot;calc&amp;quot;).</text></item><item><author>CydeWeys</author><text>Every single interaction I&amp;#x27;ve ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It&amp;#x27;s worse than the old-school &amp;quot;simple string match on installed applications and files on disk&amp;quot; in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked.&lt;p&gt;I cannot even begin to count how many times I&amp;#x27;ve tried to search for an application by name that I know is installed, only for it not to be found, then have to manually navigate in Windows Explorer to Program Files (or Program Files x86, damn you Microsoft) and launch it by double-clicking on the executable itself, which was named exactly what I thought it was and yet Cortana couldn&amp;#x27;t find it.&lt;p&gt;I &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; want to perform a web search from the Windows start menu. If I want a web search I&amp;#x27;ll do it in Chrome&amp;#x27;s address bar. When I type &amp;quot;notepad&amp;quot; I want it to launch Notepad, not query the web!&lt;p&gt;Does anyone think that Cortana is an improvement? How did it even get launched in this state?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>panarky</author><text>Type &amp;#x27;upda&amp;#x27; to get Windows Update, but instead it shows Java&amp;#x27;s updater.&lt;p&gt;Type &amp;#x27;updat&amp;#x27; and all search results disappear completely.&lt;p&gt;Type &amp;#x27;upd&amp;#x27; and now it shows Windows Update but not the Java update.&lt;p&gt;Type fast and get different results than if you type slow.&lt;p&gt;Type the same thing a third time and get different results than the first two times.&lt;p&gt;And now Cortana keeps bugging me with lame notifications. How do I turn this off?</text></comment>
<story><title>Cortana is really bad</title><url>https://medium.com/@johndavidback/cortana-is-really-really-bad-6ca96733ef4d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fpgaminer</author><text>See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft&amp;#x27;s name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something.  Now everything is starting to make sense.  I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10.  I&amp;#x27;d type &amp;quot;remov&amp;quot; and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications.  Great.  But if I accidentally finished and typed &amp;quot;remove&amp;quot; the result would disappear.  I felt like I was going crazy or something.  Comforting to know everyone is having similar problems ... though still just as bewildering as to why it&amp;#x27;s happening in the first place.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s weird that there are no great &amp;quot;magic search&amp;quot; tools on any desktop environment I&amp;#x27;ve used.  Windows 7 is close, but doesn&amp;#x27;t include any fancy results (can&amp;#x27;t have it do quick math, etc).  Mac&amp;#x27;s Spotlight gets everything right, except it won&amp;#x27;t open a new window if I type, say, &amp;quot;firefox&amp;quot;.  It&amp;#x27;ll just pull up a window I already have open (no way to change that behavior without weird hacks).  Unity&amp;#x27;s gets confused and breaks too often.  Cinnamon&amp;#x27;s sorts results alphabetically.  Gnome&amp;#x27;s is fairly close to ideal, though it forgets launch history too quickly (if I type &amp;quot;calc&amp;quot; and select LibreOffice&amp;#x27;s Calc just _once_ it&amp;#x27;ll start showing that first, instead of Calculator which I want 95% of the time when typing &amp;quot;calc&amp;quot;).</text></item><item><author>CydeWeys</author><text>Every single interaction I&amp;#x27;ve ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It&amp;#x27;s worse than the old-school &amp;quot;simple string match on installed applications and files on disk&amp;quot; in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked.&lt;p&gt;I cannot even begin to count how many times I&amp;#x27;ve tried to search for an application by name that I know is installed, only for it not to be found, then have to manually navigate in Windows Explorer to Program Files (or Program Files x86, damn you Microsoft) and launch it by double-clicking on the executable itself, which was named exactly what I thought it was and yet Cortana couldn&amp;#x27;t find it.&lt;p&gt;I &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; want to perform a web search from the Windows start menu. If I want a web search I&amp;#x27;ll do it in Chrome&amp;#x27;s address bar. When I type &amp;quot;notepad&amp;quot; I want it to launch Notepad, not query the web!&lt;p&gt;Does anyone think that Cortana is an improvement? How did it even get launched in this state?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wrycoder</author><text>One app search engine I deal with:  type “remo” and hesitate a heartbeat. System fills “remove”, meanwhile I finish “ve&amp;lt;enter&amp;gt;” and the system searches for “removeve”.</text></comment>