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Comment by jcastro | Hacker News Reader

> It is really just sad to see them selling out to Amazon like this, and I wish it didn't have to be this way.

I think many people confuse the smart scopes as "selling out to Amazon." The lenses integrate a bunch of online sources, some are commercial, some are not. You can try it by hitting the super key and doing something like `wiki:metallica` or `code:discourse` (which searches github for projects, etc.). There's something like 100 sources for information in the dash. Amazon is just one of them.

It's closer to something like Watson for the Mac or the integrated search in Android. Unfortunately people just assume that Ubuntu has "amazon spyware". If you don't like the integrated online search it's one switch to turn it off and Unity will revert to offline-only searches in the Dash.

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How many of those sources have a "Buy for $x" button under them? And I don't necessarily want to send the context of searches for content on my own computer over the wire to Canonical's servers (especially these days).

I'm not saying the lens search is an awful thing for everyone. What I'm saying is that they should have the button set to "off" by default, let people know what is available to them, tell them about how it works, and then ask if they want it or not. That's it. That's all it would take.

But even if they do that... isn't it still like the Java installer asking you to install an Ask.com plugin or something? I mean... that's kinda the lowest of the low for free (as in beer) software. Searching Wikipedia and for .git repos online is one thing. Ads are different.

Google Desktop Search did a lot of things right. This was one of them. After(?) the normal EULA text they would pop another one, something like:

READ THIS CAREFULLY, THIS IS NOT THE NORMAL YADDA-YADDA: If you enable Google Desktop Search this and this will happen, which is most likely what you want but you need to be aware of it. Do you want to enable?

And what happened? Google Desktop Search was discontinued in 2011.

> And I don't necessarily want to send the context of searches for content on my own computer over the wire to Canonical's servers (especially these days).

So why are you typing them in the global search tab of the dash? Use the applications tab if you want to search for local applications, or the files tab if you want to search for local file. Super+A and Super+F pulls them up quickly.

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