Microsoft Brings a Search Box on the Windows 10 Lock Screen Because Why Not

Microsoft is experimenting with all kinds of changes as part of the Windows Insider program, and the preview builds of Windows 10 that it ships to testers often reveal quite some interesting ideas.

This isn’t the case today, as the latest Windows 10 20H1 preview build does come with such a feature idea, but it’s something that few people are likely to find useful.

Twitter user Albacore discovered that Windows 10 build 18932 comes with a search box on the lock screen, and by the looks of things, it appears to be the search experience that you can access when the device is unlocked and you click the search box in the taskbar.

Windows 10 20H1 due in the spring

Needless to say, it’s hard to understand why Microsoft thinks it’s a good idea to enable the search experience on the lock screen because performing a search without unlocking the device shouldn’t be a feature in the first place.

While some might think that enabling the search on a locked device could be quite a neat touch, such an implementation could create additional security risks, possibly exposing the PC even without unlocking it.

It goes without saying that this is just an experiment, so it remains to be seen if Microsoft does want to make this search feature available in a production build of Windows 10.

For the time being, however, a dedicated option in Settings isn’t available to enable this search experience, but if Microsoft decides to go forward with this idea, it could show up in a future preview build.

Windows 10 20H1 is projected to launch in the spring of 2020, so Microsoft still has a lot of time to play with this kind of experiments before finalizing the development of the update.