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Ubuntu, non-advertisements, and spywareUbuntu, non-advertisements, and spywarePosted Dec 18, 2012 5:43 UTC (Tue) by gutschke (subscriber, #27910)In reply to: Ubuntu, non-advertisements, and spyware by michaeljt Parent article: Ubuntu, non-advertisements, and spyware
Your comment is sending somewhat mixed messages.
On the one hand you are complaining that the searches done through Dash are insufficiently targeted.
On the other hand you suggest that Ubuntu should anonymize queries.
This is somewhat contradictory. Anonymized queries generally suffer from being poorly targeted. The more the search engine knows about you, the better it can target its search results. So, in an ideal world, the search engine should have a pretty good profile about you, your interests, and your activities.
At the very least, it should probably know whether you are currently performing a commercial query, or whether you are just looking for a local file. IMHO, this is the biggest shortcoming in using something like Dash to do searches.
And of course, there is always a very legitimate concern that the search engine should also preserve your privacy.
Striking a good balance can be quite challenging.
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Ubuntu, non-advertisements, and spyware Posted Dec 20, 2012 12:17 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
gutschke wrote on Dec 18:
> On the one hand you are complaining that the searches done through Dash are insufficiently targeted. > > On the other hand you suggest that Ubuntu should anonymize queries. [...] > Striking a good balance can be quite challenging. I think that this circle can be squared though. By having separate "search on hard disk" and "search on Amazon" functions, Ubuntu can target the searches enough to make me happy - namely that hard disk searches do not show Amazon results - without having to contact Amazon's servers, or indeed Canonical's, at all.
Ubuntu, non-advertisements, and spyware Posted Dec 23, 2012 16:38 UTC (Sun) by markshuttle (subscriber, #22379) [Link]
Well, exactly. And you'll find Super-F searches on-disk files exclusively. The dash has had a network components to many searches from the start - notably in the music and video lenses, for example. It was including Amazon in the Home search that sent RMS into apoplexy. Perhaps he has an issue with Amazon at large.
At the end of the day, the core issue is a user experience one. What does the average user want when they search "everything". We think that is undoubtedly an expanding set, that will include, well, everything. RMS and others feel that the user should specify that exactly, search for search. We feel that will lead to an EMACS style user experience ;)
Ubuntu, non-advertisements, and spyware Posted Dec 23, 2012 17:18 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Can you simply make a dialog that asks users "Your search is going to be sent to Amazon, do you want to continue?" the first time the global search is used.
It needs not to be very obtrusive, a simple band should suffice, like the one that FireFox shows during the first run.
Ubuntu, non-advertisements, and spyware Posted Dec 20, 2012 13:08 UTC (Thu) by Otus (guest, #67685) [Link]
> On the one hand you are complaining that the searches done through Dash
> are insufficiently targeted. > > On the other hand you suggest that Ubuntu should anonymize queries. > > This is somewhat contradictory.
Only somewhat: anonymizing queries does not prevent you from doing targeting
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