That's when I quit using Ubuntu. And sure, you could turn it off ;)
I believe they took that out ASAP. It's not a great sign management made the choice in the first place but backtracking on a bad choice these days is actually pretty rare for a company to do and I find the action somewhat promising.
I don't recall that it was quite ASAP, but yes, it did get removed.
The worst aspect, though, was that they made Amazon search the default, and provided no opportunity to opt out during installation.