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I'm actually not sure after reading both again -- Shuttleworth seems to imply that they're not doing this for money, but he doesn't explicitly say it.

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.

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> Shuttleworth seems to imply that they're not doing this for money, but he doesn't explicitly say it

What else would Amazon referrals be about, if not money?

You can do things for more than one reason. They can think these results will be beneficial to users and help keep Canonical solvent.

I find it very hard to believe that anyone, let alone the presumably technologically proficient people at Canonical, would actually think that sponsored search results are useful. When was the last time anyone clicked a sponsored Google result?

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