Ever noticed suggestions of books and other stuff unrelated to your queries when using Ubuntu Dash with Unity Desktop? Well, that’s because Ubuntu 13.04 is shipped with a feature called Shopping Lens which includes search results from Amazon. This feature searches Amazon online catalog of product and displays them next to your queries in Dash.

If you want nothing to do with Amazon results on your local machine, then read on, because this brief tutorial is going to show you how to disable or completely uninstall it.

Ubuntu Unity Desktop has features like Dash, Lens, Scope and others. Scope is the search engine of Unity Dash. It queries lenses which by default are, home, application, files, music, video and shopping lenses.

Amazon lens is part of the shopping lens and because online search results are included when dong queries in Dash, some folks are not very happy about this. If you’re one of those people who want to protect their privacy, then continue below to learn how to uninstall Amazon online results from Ubuntu.

The easiest way is to disable online search results from Unity Dash is to open System Settings – Privacy and disable it from there. But by doing so may also affect other lenses that need Internet connection which may include music and social.

To to just get rid of the Amazon results, you should just uninstall the shopping lens from your machine.

To do that, press Ctrl – Alt – T on your keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below to remove it.

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping


That’s it! After running the above commands, Amazon suggestions will be turned off from your machine.

To re-enable it, run the commands below. You may have to restart your computer to see it.

sudo apt-get install unity-lens-shopping

 

Enjoy!

 

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