It also makes more sense for music - search for an artist, and you can see the tracks you already own, followed by tracks available to buy with a single click.
The other thing is, I don't want my experience on Amazon to be modified by the things I type into my OS's search box, which I would expect to be private. What if, in a fit of loneliness, I search for my porn directory, then get a bunch of related items appearing on my Amazon front page?
> This means that "a search for 'The Beatles' is likely to
> trigger the Music and Video scopes, showing results that
> will contain local and online sources—with the online
> sources querying your personal cloud as well as other
> free and commercial sources like YouTube, Last.fm,
> Amazon, etc.," Canonical's Cristian Parrino wrote.
This has been aired on another thread a day or so ago. Testing the 'feature' in Ubuntu 12.10 suggests that work has been done on making the response faster, and on making sure your whole query gets passed on.
I'm not sure I want all this noise when using a desktop. We shall see what it looks like when 13.04 lands.
From http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182
It sounds like they're working to expand the search functionality with users' best interests in mind, not adding advertisements as everyone seems to think.
> it is being done to track my interests for monetary gain in the form of referral links
They're just search results, not ads. Read the blog post from Shuttleworth.
The last seems to be the correct answer - affiliate links are used. I see no evidence Stallman is incorrect and the Shuttleworth blog article does not say they don't use affiliate links.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/192725/how-do-i-make-sure-tha...
> The Amazon affiliate referral happens if you've arrived at the Amazon property via a 'tagged' link. Both links clicked via the dash which go to Amazon sites, and the shortcut in the launcher will add the tag. The tag adds a cookie which lasts for 24 hours. If you buy anything during that period, Canonical will get some affiliate revenue.
Either way, these search results are distinctly different from the ads in the launcher that people were talking about a couple weeks ago, but everyone seems to be mixing the two up.
Both can be easily disabled, though. And searching your own machine is still an option.
What else would Amazon referrals be about, if not money?
Does Canonical make money off this arrangement? Definately
so there is a display of products/services the user never asked for, that results in a monetary gain by the company pushing them.
Id call that an ad.
"they're just diplaying relevant Amazon results"
How are these not ads? Especially when they have affiliate codes? I can't think of a reasonable definition of "ad" that doesn't include this.
From Wikipedia:
"Advertising is a form of communication for marketing and used to encourage or persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners; sometimes a specific group) to continue or take some new action. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common."
Sounds to me it's exactly the definition of advertising.
Search results from a collection of commercial products, provided by a retailer of commercial products, are ads.
I don't agree with it, and I think it's the wrong move and certainly shouldn't be done without prior user consent, but let's not get hyperbolic.
I don't agree with Stallman on everything, but I do feel increasingly uneasy with nearly all aspects of modern computing when it comes to privacy and so I support him in calling this sort of thing out.
I'm not quite so presumptuous, especially knowing how many times Ubuntu has been mentioned in the past 5 years or so as a great option for peoples' parents and other less-technical people.
Part of the issue is that many users do not understand the concept of "local files". For example my mother when looking for papers for her class will do a search through the universities page find a paper. Because the online PDF viewer sucks I showed her how to download the file and open it in Adobe. Now when she needs the paper again dose she just goto downloads and open it up? No she goes through the whole search process again. Even if the window with the document is just minimized she will end up going though the whole search process to download another copy. I showed her how to search for documents on her computer which helped but she was confused why documents from the "internet" showed up sometimes. Now the more shocking thing she is apparently one of the goto computer people at the elementary school where she teaches.
Really this shouldn't be a shock to us anymore we have to realize that most people are very, very non-technical and easily confused. These features are designed for them, so they don't have to figure out which search box to use. Especially when you realize we are likely to be storing more stuff in the cloud because it's more available and reliable (how many redundant offsite-backups do you have of your data?), these features make sense. There are issues about how they are communicated so people aren't surprised but I feel these are reasonable attempts to improve a product.
http://angryhacker.com/blog/archive/0001/01/01/google-and-pr...
Even if the search is remote the user must first be consented if his data is being sent anywhere else for any reason, like how IE doesn't send search terms for suggestons by default until the user clicks "Turn on suggestions (send keystrokes to bing)"