Whenever, you start typing in Unity Dash to search for an application or a file in your computer, your search terms will be automatically sent to third parties such as Amazon, and the third parties will display the relevant results (mostly ads) depending upon your search terms. If you don’t like this feature and feel this is really annoying to you, you can disable it.
For example, when I type Terminal in the Unity Dash, It displays the Terminal application, and other third party junks(which I don’t want always) from the web.
As you see in the above screenshot, Unity displays the built-in **Terminal** application, reference links, weather links and other third party suggestions such as movies etc. This is very annoying and looks bad on Unity Dash. Also, it displays too many search results, and confuse me.
If you don’t need this feature like me, enter the following command in your Terminal:
# Block connections to Ubuntu's ad server, just in case
if ! grep -q "127.0.0.1 productsearch.ubuntu.com" /etc/hosts; then
echo -e "\n127.0.0.1 productsearch.ubuntu.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts >/dev/null
fi
echo "All done. Enjoy your privacy."
fi
Again, I entered Terminal on Unity dash. Now the unity displays only the Terminal application, not the other unwanted junks, and now Unity Dash looks good.
**Update**: This trick is only for Unity desktop. If you use other DE’s such as Gnome, LXDE or XFCE, you don’t have to do this. Also, this online search feature will not be included in Ubuntu 14.10 and upcoming versions.