I apologize if this has already been asked and answered somewhere, but I've recently been upgraded to a Windows 11 laptop, and I've installed Start11v2 on it. Most things seem to be working fine, however search is exhibiting a strange behavior. I have "Use Start11 search in the Start11 start menu" and "Use old Start10 style search" set to on in the Search settings, everything else is set to off.

For Traditional program shortcuts (let's use Excel as an example here), if i hit the windows key and start typing, I can type all the way up to "exce" and I get three sections: Programs, Documents, and Files and Folders. In the Programs section, I see a single shortcut for excel. If I right click and tell it "Go to file location", it opens up File Explorer to where the shortcut is located (in this case "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office").

So far so good. But if I actually type it all the way out in the search box ("excel"), I suddenly have two matches in the Programs section. One is the same shortcut from above, the second one seems to be the actual executable itself ("Go to file location" opens up file explorer to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16" in this case).

This behavior is kind of distracting, because it only happens for some programs and not others, and it's not always clear at a quick glance which icon I actual want to click on. (Specifically, it only happens for programs whose executable names match the shortcut names, so it happens for Excel and OneNote but not for Word or Powerpoint.) It'll also match executables (even files without the exe extension) if I type in the whole name--for example, typing "gpedi" shows no results (because I don't have a shortcut anywhere called that) but as soon as I finish it to "gpedit", gpedit.msc shows up as a search result.

Is there any way at all to modify this behavior? Any way I can tell it not to match executables in random spots on my hard drive? This doesn't appear to be a Windows Search setting, because if I turn off Start11 search, the built in Windows 11 search doesn't do this odd duplication. If I turn off "Use old Start10 style search" but leave Start11 search on, I get kind of a hybrid of this--two excel icons, one always under "Best Match" and one under "Apps". But this happens no matter how much of "excel" I type in the search box.

Winver reports Microsoft Windows Version 24H2 (OS Build 26100.3775). Start 11v2 reports that it is version 2.51.