With the holidays right around the corner, we know that many
kids and teens have a specific game, gaming console or controller on their wish
lists. As parents, we know some of you may be very familiar with gaming while
others may feel out of the loop. I’m a parent myself, so I understand the
challenges of balancing your kids’ passion for gaming with other important
things like homework, time with family, chores, etc. But Xbox is here to help!
And just in time for the holidays, we have a special video filled with
must-know gaming tips for families.
Join us as host Jessica Chobot – full-time gamer and mother
– dives into the essential recommendations covering:
How to setup a new console ahead of time so kids
can get right into gaming
How to create a child or teen account
How to install screen time limits and content
filters
Family-friendly games to consider
We’ve got a ton of helpful tips packed into this short video
to help make sure everyone in your family has fun while gaming, but if there is
one thing we want parents to take away, it’s this: make sure your children are
using a child
or teen account when using their Xbox One console or Windows 10 device.
Child and teen accounts give you as parents access to our customizable and easy
to use family
settings so you can decide what is right for your children:
Screen Time Limits: Manage how much
gaming time is appropriate for each day of the week
Content filters: Ensure kids only have access
to age-appropriate content
Privacy: Determine who your kids can play
and chat with
Spending Limits: Avoid surprise spending by
setting up an allowance or requiring your permission to make any purchases
We are constantly updating family settings and safety
features to make sure they fit the unique needs of families today, for example,
we recently unveiled content
filters that work across Xbox Live. Content Filters empower gamers – or the
parents of young gamers – to choose what messages they are comfortable
receiving when engaged in the Xbox community and what is not ok and thus will
be blocked. Filters can be customized based on four tiers of filtration, and we
recommend the Friendly level be applied to child accounts. These content
filters are part of our moderation efforts that run 24/7 across the globe to help
ensure that Xbox is a safe, welcoming and inclusive place where everyone can
have fun.
At Xbox, it’s important to us that families feel supported
and have the tools they need to make sure gaming is a part of a balanced life. Additionally,
we are always listening and trying to address feedback from families. We’re
happy to share tips and pointers about getting the most out of family settings
and so much more, so we encourage you to give this video a watch. Enjoy, and
have fun gaming this holiday season!
One of the great privileges of my job is meeting so many people around the world who are applying technology to have an impact – in their organizations, communities and beyond. As I reflect on 2019, here’s a look at 10 people who inspired me by exemplifying how technology can be used to create new opportunity for everyone. You can also learn more about each of their amazing stories here: https://lnkd.in/gw4MbsE
The firm writes their own software, so Schumacher says they’re “very hungry” for new processing power in a mobile package, as they’re constantly roaming around the office, and around the world. They used to lug around heavy models to meetings. Now, they bring laptops.
“That’s why we love Acer and ConceptD’s product line,” Schumacher says. “ConceptD is helping us to visualize and simulate the experience with real time navigation through the airport. ConceptD opens a powerful window into our creations ahead of construction.”
They use the ConceptD 7 Pro, “which runs our models faster than any desktop or workstation we have in the office. That’s a game changer.”
Patrik Schumacher
Schumacher believes they’re winning new business as a result.
“We noticed that it’s super sharp, super true to color and we love that. We need that because we are simulating something which we translate in reality, and we want to see what we get ahead of time. So for us as designers, that’s critical,” he says.
They have a dedicated VR lab and working group in the office.
When they pitch to clients, they use VR and ConceptD for presentations that deliver a realistic experience of the project. For instance, when they envision redesigns of city districts, the city’s representatives can move within the design. The firm has won assignments based on these kinds of presentations.
“That makes it compelling for the customer, rather than having static images or drawings to react to. It’s a real convincing tool for the client, but also for us,” Schumacher says. “We discover what the space is like, what you see from where, and that helps us as designers bring it to life.”
Lead photo: Beijing Daxing International Airport, photo by Hufton+Crow
The holidays can be a busy time, but at Bing we hope to make your holiday season easier and more enjoyable! Today we’re excited to announce an advanced flight booking experience as well as expanded visual search shopping scenarios.
Flight booking answer
One area we’re seeking to make more frictionless for our users is flight booking. Finding flights can be time-consuming, confusing, and involve searches across various websites, particularly during the holidays.
To solve this, we partnered with flight booking sites to provide a comprehensive booking experience in one place on Bing, so you can browse relevant results with accurate prices and minimal wait time. This new experience also leverages real-time data from the world’s leading Global Distribution Systems, and direct integration with top airlines to ensure a seamless experience for Bing users, from searching and comparing flights to booking them in one place.
For example, if you’re looking for a Vegas getaway for the holidays, simply search for the trip you’d like to make, such as ‘flights from New York to Las Vegas’, and go from there.
If you click on a flight option to learn more about it, you’ll be taken to our comprehensive deep-dive page, which includes filtering options to allow you to quickly narrow the options down to the flight of your choice based on number of stops, airline, departure and arrival time, and price.
When you’ve found the option you want, you can click through right to a booking site to finalize your flight.
Visual search from more places in Windows
We’re also excited to let you use Bing’s existing visual search features in more places than ever before. Visual search lets you search using an image, so you can find what you’re looking for even when you don’t know what words to use.
We already have features that allow you to get visually-similar images from within Bing image results. Now, we’ve expanded and streamlined this capability so you can also use Bing visual search capabilities wherever you are, such as on third-party retailer site or in your own existing photos.
For example, imagine you’re holiday shopping on a retailer’s website or a home decor blog and see a couch you really like. Simply use the search bar in Windows, click the ‘Search with a screenshot’ icon in the lower right corner, and take a capture of the furniture that caught your eye.[1] Bing will provide visually-similar products from various retailers at diverse price points.[2]
Visual search also works from photos you already have in Windows (for example, if you have a picture of a pair of boots you’d like to replace). Just find the picture you like in the Photos app, open it, then right-click and click “Search the web with image”. In the newest Photos app, available to a percentage of our users today, it’s even easier – just click the “Search the web with image” action in the toolbar.
Please note you must be updated to Windows 10 May 2019 Update or newer to see these features. You can learn more about this feature here.
Rewards
As always, searching on Bing when you’re signed in allows you to earn Rewards points. You can redeem these points for gift cards or choose to donate your points to support the charities you care about most.
We hope you’re as excited by these feature as we are, and hope you have a great holiday season!
[1] This feature is rolling out to users in the U.S. first with international markets to follow shortly after. [2] Shopping results are only available to users in the United States and United Kingdom.
With the first half of the school year wrapping up in most places and the holidays upon us, we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight the resources we introduced in 2019 that you said were most helpful to you and your students. And we wanted to make sure you didn’t miss anything that could have a positive impact on your instruction going forward.
Learning Tools
Reviewing engagement across our social media channels, it’s clear you liked this year’s updates to Learning Tools, free Microsoft resources that make classrooms more accessible and support students with reading, writing, math and communication. Learning tools are available in Microsoft products you use every day in the classroom. For more on how to incorporate Learning Tools into your classroom, check out this post.
We’re particularly grateful to you for sharing your stories about the benefits of Immersive Reader, which improves the readability of content and is integrated into Microsoft products as well as third-party applications. You noted that this integration was particularly helpful for students with dyslexia and other reading-related learning differences. Maria Mercedes Gazaneo, a teacher in Buenos Aires, explains eloquentlyhere how previously reluctant readers have come around to loving reading with the help of Immersive Reader. At Microsoft Education, it’s our mission to empower every student to achieve more, and we’re so glad this tool, coupled with your commitment to your students, is helping advance that goal.
Product Updates
As far as product updates go, you told us loud (especially so at the rocking Flipgrid party at ISTE) and clear that the newly designed Flipgrid was a hit and is helping you elevate student voices in and beyond the classroom. We have you to thank. From FlipgridAR to the new Shorts Camera to Disco Library Playlists, every improvement to Flipgrid was created, driven, and inspired by your innovative ideas and feedback.
“Flipgrid gives students a VOICE! Flipgrid allows those that are quiet and nervous the opportunity to share their ideas and thoughts in a manner that is conducive to their learning styles. It appeals to every student in the classroom.” – Natasha Rachell, Education Technology Specialist with Atlanta Public Schools.
You also told us the new PowerPoint Presenter coach is another tool that is helping students develop strong communication skills. In case you haven’t tried it yet, the AI-powered tool lets students practice presentations and then provides guidance on pacing, language and more.
Thanks for letting us know you loved Microsoft Teams‘ new Simplified UX!The redesign is among many improvements to make teaching, assessment, and collaboration effective and easy, all while saving you time.
Speaking of saving time, Grade Sync is now integrated with PowerSchool, enabling teachers to sync assignments and grades directly to PowerTeacher Pro. But wait, there’s more! The new teacher gradebook with individualized student progress, weekly assignments summary email for parents and guardians and many others. Check out this post for more detail on all the Teams updates from this year!
Several exciting updates to Minecraft: Education Edition came your way this year too, based on helpful feedback from our educator community. Immersive Reader was integrated along with single sign-on and multiplayer join codes for an easier classroom experience. We launched Minecraft lessons and immersive worlds with NASA, World Wildlife Fund, and partners in New Zealand. Finally, a new Minecraft Hour of Code introduces students to coding with a lesson on preventing forest fires and artificial intelligence! Check out the free coding lesson in Minecraft: Education Edition, no license required. We talked about Hour of Code in last month’s What’s New in EDU, available here if you missed it.
Just ahead of the current school year, we made dozens of updates to OneNote and Class Notebook based on your input, and we’re glad to see you’re using those successfully. They include the ability to distribute pages to specific students, integrating OneNote and Class Notebook with Teams, and making it possible for students to generate math practice quizzes in OneNote. We’re glad to hear these updates are helping you personalize instruction and promote student-centered learning.
“I found OneNote to be a huge help, both in note taking and Immersive Reader. Also linking Microsoft Lens to OneNote has made other subject content ‘interactive.’ My learners were amazed, and this teacher applauds the ingenuity of Microsoft to cater for inclusive education.” –Viola Van der Westhuizen, a teacher in South Africa who works with youth in the criminal justice system.
Finally, we’ve seen those social media posts indicating you like the latest Microsoft Excel update, allowing you and your students to take a picture of data, say in a textbook, and then upload it and open it in Excel, where it’s converted into a table. We hope that’s helping your students develop analytical skills and solve real-world problems using data.
Partnerships
We’re thrilled to work
with educators like you every day, as well as other partners committed to fostering
inclusive learning environments that help all students succeed. This past year,
we teamed up with some inspiring collaborators, and we’re so glad to see you celebrating
those partnerships with us on social media. Just some of these include:
Click here to read our Partner Spotlight series from ISTE 2019.
Free trainings,
workshops and more
We know how committed
you are to professional growth, and we’re so glad you found many of our teacher
development tools to be useful in 2019. Among those you indicated were most helpful
this year were:
Free in-store trainings on using Microsoft Education tools. Our stores offer more than 200,000 hours of free workshops throughout the year, so find one that’s right for you!
Our You Can in :90 video series, which offers quick tips for using Microsoft Education tools. We pick topics based on your input, so keep that coming.
Resources like this how-to video to help you bring digital storytelling to life in your classroom with Video Editor for Windows 10.
Our new Microsoft Educator Center, where you can take online courses and stay up on a host training opportunities and resources for educators.
Our new newsletter. If you haven’t yet signed up, you can do so here.
Peer networking
It’s clear you enjoy connecting with each other and helping students do that, too. This year, thousands of students from more than 80 countries connected during our Global Learning Connectionevent, in which students meet virtually and listen to guest speakers using Teams, Skype and Flipgrid.
“The MSFTGlobalConnect was a HUGE HIGHLIGHT of my year.” –Kerry-Ann Van Der Merwe, a Grade 5 teacher in South Africa.
Speaking of guest speakers, you shared that you were inspired by the Skype in the Classroom event with world-renowned scientist and environmentalist Jane Goodall. Missed it? We’ve got you covered. You can find a recording here.
To those of you who participated in Hack the Classroom in June, a big thank you. We’re so grateful to you for being part of that engaging discussion on developing social and emotional skills in students, preparing them for future success, meeting the needs of English language learners and more.
We’re also thrilled to see how supportive you are of one another. Thank you for sharing the news about our Microsoft Innovative Educator Experts class of 2019-2020 and responding to our call on Twitter to tag other potential nominees. Speaking of Twitter, we also are overjoyed to see your enthusiasm for our regular TweetMeets. By far the most popular one of the year was the July TweetMeet focused on student-centered learning.
Device spotlight
Windows 10 helps deliver personalized learning for every student. Find the right device for your school today. This month we’re featuring the Lenovo 100e, with pricing starting at just $199 USD for a 4/64 storage configuration with the latest-gen Intel Celeron processor. This durable laptop is built to endure the rough and tumble of the classroom with a new, sleek chassis and weighs just 2.7 lbs. All-day battery keeps everyone’s focus on lessons, not on hunting down a power cord.
In conclusion
Well, 2019 really was quite a year for us here on the Microsoft Education team. We’re so glad you found many of the resources we shared to be helpful to you and your students. We can’t wait to show you what’s ahead in the new year.
Mark your calendars for January 16, when we’ll have a Facebook Live event highlighting what we’re rolling out at the start of 2020. You won’t be disappointed.
As always, we love hearing from you and value your feedback. Let us know what you think of this list of highlights from the year on Twitter by tagging @MicrosoftEDU!
Making his way across the galaxy to our studio, we sat down with talented actor John Boyega to catch up on one of the world’s most iconic franchises and play the brand-new, action-adventure game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in the latest episode of Xbox Sessions.
Although John’s Star Wars character, Finn, rejected his
stormtrooper armor, John was ready for battle and showed us his own surprising
aptitude with the Force as he mastered the art of lightsaber combat in a boss
fight against the hulking Inquisitor, the Ninth Sister. Not to mention John
appreciated the new cinematic cuts in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – especially
because they gave him enough time to grab a snack while playing.
You, too, can become a Jedi and take on the galaxy-spanning adventure that awaits in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Orderavailable now for Xbox One, the world’s most powerful console.
Stay tuned to Xbox Wire for more upcoming episodes of Xbox
Sessions!
The increased connectivity of computers and the growth of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in most organizations is making the distribution of malicious software (malware) easier. Unlike other types of malicious programs that may usually go undetected for a longer period, a ransomware attack is usually experienced immediately, and its impact on information technology infrastructure is often irreversible.
As part of Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team (DART) Incident Response engagements, we regularly get asked by customers about “paying the ransom” following a ransomware attack. Unfortunately, this situation often leaves most customers with limited options, depending on the business continuity and disaster recovery plans they have in place.
The two most common options are either to pay the ransom (with the hopes that the decryption key obtained from the malicious actors works as advertised) or switch gears to a disaster recovery mode, restoring systems to a known good state.
The unfortunate truth about most organizations is that they are often only left with the only option of paying the ransom, as the option to rebuild is taken off the table by lack of known good backups or because the ransomware also encrypted the known good backups. Moreover, a growing list of municipalities around the U.S. has seen their critical infrastructure, as well as their backups, targeted by ransomware, a move by threat actors to better guarantee a payday.
We never encourage a ransomware victim to pay any form of ransom demand. Paying a ransom is often expensive, dangerous, and only refuels the attackers’ capacity to continue their operations; bottom line, this equates to a proverbial pat on the back for the attackers. The most important thing to note is that paying cybercriminals to get a ransomware decryption key provides no guarantee that your encrypted data will be restored.
So, what options do we recommend? The fact remains that every organization should treat a cybersecurity incident as a matter of when it will happen and not whether it will happen. Having this mindset helps an organization react quickly and effectively to such incidents when they happen. Two major industry standard frameworks, the Sysadmin, Audit, Network, and Security (SANS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), both have published similar concepts on responding to malware and cybersecurity incidents. The bottom line is that every organization needs to be able to plan, prepare, respond, and recover when faced with a ransomware attack.
Outlined below are steps designed to help organizations better plan and prepare to respond to ransomware and major cyber incidents.
How to plan and prepare to respond to ransomware
1. Use an effective email filtering solution
According to the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 24 of 2018, spam and phishing emails are still the most common delivery method for ransomware infections. To effectively stop ransomware at its entry point, every organization needs to adopt an email security service that ensures all email content and headers entering and leaving the organization are scanned for spam, viruses, and other advanced malware threats. By adopting an enterprise-grade email protection solution, most cybersecurity threats against an organization will be blocked at ingress and egress.
2. Regular hardware and software systems patching and effective vulnerability management
Many organizations are still failing to adopt one of the age-old cybersecurity recommendations and important defenses against cybersecurity attacks—applying security updates and patches as soon as the software vendors release them. A prominent example of this failure was the WannaCry ransomware events in 2017, one of the largest global cybersecurity attacks in the history of the internet, which used a leaked vulnerability in Windows networking Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, for which Microsoft had released a patch nearly two months before the first publicized incident. Regular patching and an effective vulnerability management program are important measures to defend against ransomware and other forms of malware and are steps in the right direction to ensure every organization does not become a victim of ransomware.
3. Use up-to-date antivirus and an endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution
While owning an antivirus solution alone does not ensure adequate protection against viruses and other advanced computer threats, it’s very important to ensure antivirus solutions are kept up to date with their software vendors. Attackers invest heavily in the creation of new viruses and exploits, while vendors are left playing catch-up by releasing daily updates to their antivirus database engines. Complementary to owning and updating an antivirus solution is the use of EDR solutions that collect and store large volumes of data from endpoints and provide real-time host-based, file-level monitoring and visibility to systems. The data sets and alerts generated by this solution can help to stop advanced threats and are often leveraged for responding to security incidents.
4. Separate administrative and privileged credentials from standard credentials
Working as a cybersecurity consultant, one of the first recommendations I usually provide to customers is to separate their system administrative accounts from their standard user accounts and to ensure those administrative accounts are not useable across multiple systems. Separating these privileged accounts not only enforces proper access control but also ensures that a compromise of a single account doesn’t lead to the compromise of the entire IT infrastructure. Additionally, using Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Privileged Identity Management (PIM), and Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions are ways to effectively combat privileged account abuse and a strategic way of reducing the credential attack surface.
5. Implement an effective application whitelisting program
It’s very important as part of a ransomware prevention strategy to restrict the applications that can run within an IT infrastructure. Application whitelisting ensures only applications that have been tested and approved by an organization can run on the systems within the infrastructure. While this can be tedious and presents several IT administrative challenges, this strategy has been proven effective.
6. Regularly back up critical systems and files
The ability to recover to a known good state is the most critical strategy of any information security incident plan, especially ransomware. Therefore, to ensure the success of this process, an organization must validate that all its critical systems, applications, and files are regularly backed up and that those backups are regularly tested to ensure they are recoverable. Ransomware is known to encrypt or destroy any file it comes across, and it can often make them unrecoverable; consequently, it’s of utmost importance that all impacted files can be easily recovered from a good backup stored at a secondary location not impacted by the ransomware attack.
Learn more and keep updated
Learn more about how DART helps customers respond to compromises and become cyber-resilient. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
“What would you get from paying a ransom in such an attack?” Gimnes Are asks. “You will potentially get back your encrypted data – if the attacker gives you the key. Paying the ransom would not help you to rebuild the company infrastructure, all the servers, all the PCs, all the networks.
“Paying the ransom will not help you out of the situation. You will need to rebuild your infrastructure to be safe and be sure that the attacker is not still part of it,” he adds.
At Microsoft, Eric Doerr serves as general manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center, which protects customers from being harmed by security vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s products and services. The center also rapidly repulses attacks against the Microsoft Cloud. Doerr strongly promotes transparency among organizations that suffer cyberattacks.
“Norsk Hydro set the example for the industry in this incident,” Doerr says.
“Choosing not to pay the ransom and digging in with DART to evict the attacker is great. Sharing those learnings with the world is priceless. When companies do this, it makes us all better and makes the attackers work harder,” he adds.
Of course, some companies facing a ransomware attack may be highly tempted to pay bad actors to regain their hijacked data. But paying hackers doesn’t guarantee that a company will ever recover the goods, says Ann Johnson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of cybersecurity solutions.
There’s a smarter way – following the plan executed by Norsk Hydro, says Johnson, whose team oversees DART.
“Your data is a strategic asset for you, and for cybercriminals. That’s why they want it. It is also why your data must be protected, and it should be backed up,” Johnson says.
At the same time, companies must invest in cybersecurity, she adds.
At Norsk Hydro, for example, the IT department works to increase security awareness among its employees, says Molland, the media relations SVP. That includes sending workers test emails to help train them to look for common phishing tactics like fake login pages and malicious attachments.
If companies fail to commit to cybersecurity, Johnson warns, bad actors will become repeat customers.
“You’ve likely seen signs that read, ‘Don’t feed the birds,’ when dining at an outdoor café. That’s because the birds will keep returning to the same places where they know it’s easy to be fed. It’s the same concept for cybercriminals,” Johnson says. “They know if you have weak cyber-defenses, and they will want to exploit those weaknesses over-and-over.
“The best defense is to ensure you have the right combination of people, processes and technology. We recommend you implement multifactor authentication, have a mature update process, and back up your data,” she adds.
At a Norsk Hydro extrusion plant in Norway, sales project manager Rune Johansen and extrusion anodizing fabrication manager Sten Stolpe dig through paper documentation to manually complete customer orders during the cyberattack.
In Hungary and Norway last March, DART members helped Norsk Hydro develop safe processes to restore their servers with an improved security posture. They also educated the company about the current threat landscape and known attacker behaviors to help reduce the risk of future attacks, Moeller says.
Inside Norsk Hydro, the internal response focused on multiple fronts. They launched old-school methods to resume full production and repair business operations. And they worked to protect the safety of employees and the environment.
“We operate heavy machinery. If the power is lost in an uncontrolled manner, it could risk severe safety incidents for people,” says Molland, the media relations SVP.
“Safety is always first priority with us. Secondly, it’s the concern for the environment and ensuring we don’t have any uncontrolled emissions (due to sudden machine stoppages) out to the air, land or water.”
Executives handwrote signs warning of the cyberattack, photographed them with their smart phones and texted the images to managers at Norsk Hydro plants and offices around the world. At those facilities, the staff used local printing shops to create paper signs, posting them on entryways, stairwells and elevators for employees to read as they arrived for the workday.
“Please do not connect any devices to the Hydro network. Do not turn on any devices connected to the Hydro network. Please disconnect devices from the Hydro network,” read some written alerts that also carried a simple signature: “Security.”
Two workers at a Norsk Hydro plant in Portland, Oregon manually operate machines to produce specific customer orders during the initial phase of the cyberattack.
The entire workforce did their jobs with pen and paper during the attack’s first days. Some plants switched to manual procedures to meet manufacturing orders. Retired employees – familiar with the old paper system – volunteered to return to their plants to keep production rolling.
“The way we pulled together to make the company come through the situation in one piece and get back into production has been an extreme team-building session,” Molland says.
“We have an organized emergency preparedness methodology within the company – in the corporate level, in the business area and at the plant level,” he adds. “That worked to our benefit. When this hit us, we were able to handle the situation in a constructive, organized manner.”
In other words, prevention is important but locking out all cyberattackers should not be a company’s sole security focus, says Jo De Vliegher, Norsk Hydro’s chief information officer.
“If hackers want to get in, they will get in,” De Vliegher says. “We now have an improved incident response to make sure that – should something similar happen – we are much better equipped to limit the damage in time and geography.”
Norsk Hydro reported the incident to Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service (Kripos). The case remains under investigation, Molland says.
Every day, we have questions. Search engines, apps, digital voice assistants, or phones are usually our go-to places to find answers.
You may already know that you can use the search bar in Windows – found on your PC taskbar – to find things like an app, setting, or a file you’ve been working on.
But did you know it can also find answers to questions like…
What’s the weather like in Paris? What’s the score of the Leicester City match? How do you unzip a file?
Windows brings all these searches together in one place. It’s easy to find and easy to use.
You don’t have to scroll through a long list of results, you don’t have to open a browser, and you don’t have to leave whatever application you’re in. With a couple of keystrokes, you can find your answers.
“The goal was to enable search in Windows to bring the web to where you are,” says Alexander Campbell, a senior program manager working on search. “People spend a lot of time on the web and in browsers. We saw an opportunity to help people save time in Windows by bringing convenient, fast web results directly to the search bar in Windows. Stay on task and in your flow, just by hitting the Windows key or clicking on the search box.”
It’s also a convenient place to start a search that leads to a website. From the search bar in Windows, you can quickly type and navigate to a URL, without having to open a browser first.
“We have a search experience that gives you quick answers, web results and helps you start your web task. It’s amazing what you can do with it,” he adds.
Every day it gets more useful: a full web search experience powered by the intelligence of Bing. You can search for quick calculations, music videos, movie trailers, sports scores, stock prices, movie times, weather forecasts and much more. Results turn up right in the taskbar. If you want to see more, you can open the results in your browser.
“The search bar in Windows gives you the quick info you need with none of the distraction,” Campbell says. “In the middle of an essay? It’s easy to jump in, check a fact and then get back to your work.”
The Windows and Bing teams worked together to bring a true web search experience into Windows, just like what you’d expect in a browser, into the search bar. And the teams continue to improve the search capability thanks to your feedback and Bing innovation.
The search bar is also the best place to go when you need to get things done on your Windows 10 device. Let’s say you need to download an app, Search can find it for you fast. For example, type “download microsoft to-do” or “download solitaire” and get an install link in the results preview. It’s also an easy way to get Tech Help answers to common questions, like “how do I connect a printer” or “how do I unzip files.”
And now, in addition to entering a text search, you can search with an image by taking a screenshot. This feature is rolling out to users in the U.S. first with international markets to follow shortly after. (You need the Windows 10 May 2019 Update or newer to see this.)
Simply click the Bing Visual Search button in the bottom right corner and snip any part of your screen to search the web using the image.
“Visual search is a new way of searching,” says Ravi Yada, product lead for Bing Visual Search. “There are a lot of things you can’t describe in words to get good enough results. By using an image as input for search, Bing can help you search what you see.”
Bing added camera-based searches in 2017, and made visual search features available in the Windows Photos App, Microsoft Edge, the Bing App and on Android phones through Microsoft Launcher. With the latest releases of Windows, you can use Windows Search to snip any part of your screen and search.
“We found people also wanted to search with screenshots, so we brought searching with screen snips to the Windows search bar,” says Nektarios Ioannides, Bing Image Search lead.
For instance, if you’re planning your wardrobe for winter and you want inspiration from what your favorite celebs are wearing? You’ll find similar results. Or you might be shopping for furniture and see a sofa you like. Snip it and use it to comparison shop with Visual Search results [1].
Aside from finding similar products, Visual Search can recognize landmarks, flowers, celebrities, animals. It also recognizes text in images, so you can copy or search it [2].
“Search is evolving. We’re still expanding the breadth of capabilities,” Ioannides says. “It’s cool to see the growth and excitement it generates, especially as we move into a world where using our eyes to search becomes more common.”
For developers, there’s an API to incorporate Visual Search within products and apps they create.
“Search in Windows is now more intelligent than ever at getting you where you want to go, saving steps and time,” Campbell says. “We can’t wait to see how you use it.”
Let us know your feedback and what you want to see next by clicking the “Feedback” button in the top right corner of the search experience.
Eager to try this yourself? If you’re reading this on a device running Windows 10 May 2019 Update or newer, click on the following examples:
[1] Shopping results are only available to users in the United States and United Kingdom.
Brad Smith (left) is the president of Microsoft. He leads work on a range of issues involving the intersection of technology and society, including ethics, artificial intelligence, human rights, and environmental sustainability.
Yves Ubelmann (center) is an architect and the founder of Iconem, a digital architecture initiative whose mission is to preserve cultural heritage sites around the world with new technology.
Will Lewis (right) is the Principal Technical Program Manager with Microsoft Translator. He’s led the Microsoft Translator team’s efforts to build Translation engines for many of the world’s languages.
