14 DAY TRIAL // When Canonical announced their intention to make Unity's search go online, the community didn't take it too well, but now it seems that the online search paradigm in Unity is about to end.
In case you weren't aware, anything you search on the Ubuntu desktop will also query a few online sources, like Amazon for instance. When Ubuntu developers first made this option available, they didn't actually think it all the way through.
Some users discovered that even if the queries made by the users were first passing through a Canonical server which anonymized them, the return answers from Amazon went directly to the IP that originally made the request. It's easy to understand why people were not happy.
Canonical quickly made some adjustments and the problem was fixed, but Unity's search is still going online, although now it's completely anonymous. Another problem that has been raised a lot in conversations about Ubuntu was the fact that this online search was enabled by default. It's easy enough to stop it, with the push of a single button, but not all the users knew that the button existed or why the online feature existed at all.
Ubuntu developers have also started to work on the version for mobile phones and tablets, and they made a better Unity version, which is now only available on that version (should arrive on the desktop on some point). In the Ubuntu Touch Unity paradigm, the online search, Amazon included, is no longer by default because everything is based on lenses, which need to be activated.
This means that is you actually want to search Amazon for a product, you need to go and activate the Amazon lens. The same goes for all the other online sources that you need.
Ubuntu developer Michael Hall shed some light on these issues in a comment made on Google+. Keep in mind that this is how it works now, it's not certain how it will eventually end up.
“The default scope (Applications) won't return Amazon results. The Scopes scope might return the Amazon scope in response to a query, but it won't return Amazon results. The Scopes scope will send your query info to Canonical (as far as I understand it). Only searching in the Amazon scope itself will return Amazon results (it's not clear to me if these queries will still be anonymized through Canonical servers),” said Ubuntu developer Michael Hall.
Canonical didn't actually change the way they search online because of pressure from the community, they just have a different Unity that is not working the same with the old one. This is more like evolution than anything else.