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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

This is also a strange plug - if I'm looking for something in my computer, how much chance any of Amazon shopping would be relevant? If I'm looking for a notes from last week's budget planning meetings, what would they show me, shopping results for "budget notebooks"? And they expect me to be happy with it? I understand Canonical needs to make money, and with free product it requires some creative thinking, but this one makes little sense to me.

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I guess the idea is that, once you realise it searches Amazon, you go there when you are looking to buy something. I don't know if that will work, but it's more plausible than seeing something you want to buy while looking for a file.

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.

if they intend it for music that would disappoint even further. there are countless artists releasing free music, a free operating system should prefer that.

I'm sure they'd consider integrating a scope for a free music service. But the music that most people will be searching for is not (legally) free. And it's quite possible to support free software along with non-free music.

People have tried this idea before and it's never gone down well. There were those old Safari search plugins that injected Amazon affiliate links into the results, or otherwise replaced existing ones with their own. That caused outrage.

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?

The current set up has your search queries going to a server Canonical runs, which does anonymised searching of Amazon. I appreciate that's not that much better, but it does mean it won't affect your Amazon suggestions.

If you're on static IP it's not really anonymous. It wouldn't take too much time to associate the IP and the user.

   > 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.

When I read that, I thought about entomologists...

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.

If the name of the document is something like "bike parts list" or "jefferson project summary", then those words can give some indicators for ads.

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