Ubuntu To Make Amazon Product Results ‘Opt-In’ (OMG!Ubuntu)

[Posted April 1, 2014 by ris]

Ubuntu's Unity dash search has come under fire for sending search terms to Amazon (and including those results) by default. In future versions of Unity users will explicitly need to opt-in, reports OMG!Ubuntu. "In Unity 8 the search paradigm has shifted towards refinement. Gone is a central ‘home scope’ that tries to do ‘all the things’, at all times, from as many places as possible. Instead, online searches are conducted through a the (rather ridiculously named) “Scopes Scope”. When entering a query here, Unity will recommend Scopes that it thinks can deliver results pertinent to the query. This is the crucial difference: it gives you the choice of Scopes to search; it doesn’t search them for you." Unity 7 will be used in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so Amazon searches will still be on by default when that version ships later this month. (Thanks to Paul Wise)

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Posted Apr 2, 2014 2:57 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

If they've really decided opt-in is better, surely it would be easy to change it in Unity 7 too?

Ubuntu To Make Amazon Product Results ‘Opt-In’ (OMG!Ubuntu)

Posted Apr 2, 2014 3:23 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Code freezes are fun when you start letting small patches trickle through. This is obviously an enhancement and the feature deadline was months ago.

Ubuntu To Make Amazon Product Results ‘Opt-In’ (OMG!Ubuntu)

Posted Apr 2, 2014 13:08 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

And the one change that is guaranteed to cause a disaster is the tiny little cannot-break-anything micro feature addition that they'll all really like, donchaknow, slipped in right before release because it can't possibly break anything.

You *know* if they do that it'll start reformatting people's disks left right and centre. (Never mind that there's obviously no way it can possibly do anything like that! It'll find a non-obvious route that nobody thought of before now, because code is evil that way.)

Ubuntu To Make Amazon Product Results ‘Opt-In’ (OMG!Ubuntu)

Posted Apr 2, 2014 22:06 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> reformatting people's disks left right and centre

Don't forget about up and down (also past and future if you're *that* paranoid).

> Never mind that there's obviously no way it can possibly do anything like that!

Don't I know…a "hotfix" needing 4 updates due to typos and other issues on various platforms/compilers :/ .

Ubuntu To Make Amazon Product Results ‘Opt-In’ (OMG!Ubuntu)

Posted Apr 2, 2014 21:57 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

The scopes infrastructure has seen some pretty major changes in Unity 8, to the extent that we're running different versions of the scopes on the phone and desktop (the desktop is running scopes written against the old API, while the ones on the phone are written to the new API).

The primary dash page in Unity 7 is still driven via the home scope (i.e. the one that tries to aggregate results from everywhere). I wouldn't describe getting rid of that part of the UI as trivial, so it will probably have to wait until we're running the new scopes on the desktop (which probably means when Unity 8 is on the desktop).