Lots of folks misremember how the Unity Home Lens feature actually worked, and that the Ubuntu installer explicitly asked you whether you wanted it enabled.
If enabled, there was no presumption of local-only search. It was front and center in your search results, and the affiliate revenue was only collected when you clicked on that Amazon result.
Canonical claimed that the search was forwarded to them, and then anonymized to Amazon. That's more than what Microsoft seems to do with Bing results in Windows search, which you can't seem to disable without installing third-party scripts.
Was it a perfect solution? No - But it was a way to make revenue in an otherwise open-source project and free of cost. Its interesting how on some days, people argue for more money towards FOSS devs, and then others argue that revenue-building systems shouldn't be implemented. Yeah, Canonical makes enterprise investments, but they're obviously weren't in the realm of Red Hat in terms of enterprise support.
I agree that some talk at the time was overblown, most of it even.
That said, it was a braindead idea to begin with. Not one person in existence wants or expects shopping links when searching their computer via a dock like interface. This is meant for applications or files.
When shopping, most are going to research on Google...or perhaps search a category on Amazon itself before choosing a product.
I'd be curious it Ubuntu even made a single sale from that venture.
Agree that is was not a great idea, or one that anyone asked for.
I saw it as a way for Canonical to start bringing end-user-oriented features to the Linux desktop, something that Linux sorely needed circa 00s and early 10s. They also had the forethought to bring web apps to the desktop before most major players did.
It was all part of their 'continutity' push at the time: desktop and phone in one cohesive interface. Too early for its time, but its clearly working for Apple.
