Ah. When I first read your response I was wondering, "What possible searches could be resold other than the browser search results."

You obviously can't resell something like a file/application search on the local computer (akin to Spotlight search on OS X).

Apparently I was wrong: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/09/ubuntu-bakes-amazon-...

That is bad on so many levels - privacy, security, network performance, etc... Presumably every time I do one of those searches, traffic is sent over my internet connection...

I wonder what's going through Canonical's mind - And why they think this is a good idea...

The idea is to join your offline and online worlds. Maybe you don't remember if you had that file on your desktop or google drive or dropbox or ubuntu one. The unfortunate part is that online searches were launched with just Amazon, which makes it look like a money grab, when it was intended just to help the user keep their worlds in order. More online scopes will launch soon, and it'll be a lot more obvious that this is just trying to make your life better.

Yes, Canonical also makes a tiny bit of money for the Amazon integration, but that was not the driving factor behind the feature as a whole. There will be more online scopes to come, and the hope is to make your life easier, by not having to remember exactly where you put all your stuff.

Also, you can easily turn off all online searches with a single toggle inside Settings -> Security and Privacy -> Search.

Canonical knows there is a lot of heat around the feature, and they're not ignoring that, despite what it may seem like from the outside.

bs. companies implement the most important things first. now maybe canonical is running to implement searching other stuff as a fig leaf -- oh guys, no wait, we weren't just doing this to sell your local searches to advertisers. but if that weren't the purpose dropbox and google drive would have been the first implementations.