Comment 0 for bug 1198554

The "include online search results" toggle in Privacy Settings is only a partial solution to the customizability people want from Unity's online searches.

Unity 7.1, as part of the 100 Scopes initiative, adds many more scopes and allows for scopes to be individually disabled without installing them. The UI/UX for this is pretty bad though.
1. Open the Dash
2. Switch to the Applications lens
3. Click Filter Results
4. Select Search plugins
5. Select the scope you want to disable and click Disable

A better way for discoverability and usability is to have the Privacy Settings' Search tab include the list of installed scopes with an on/off toggle switch next to them.

The list of scopes can be found by recurisvely searching XDG_DATA_DIRS/unity/scopes/*.scope. If a scope is in a subdirectory, replace the / with a hyphen (for instance graphics/colourlovers.scope should be graphics-colourlovers.scope).

A .scope is a modified .desktop so display the Name and Icon listed. If an icon isn't listed, you can fall back to displaying /usr/share/icons/unity-icon-theme/places/svg/service-generic.svg .

To disable a scope, add its name to gsettings com.canonical.Unity.Lenses disabled-scopes.

Optionally, you can extend the basic enabling/disabling interface to allow choosing which scopes should always be searched and which should show up by default in the Home lens.

See also the final mockup on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityAndPrivacySettings for a proposed Ubuntu mobile version of this.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: activity-log-manager 0.9.6-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.10.0-2.9-generic 3.10.0
Uname: Linux 3.10.0-2-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.10.2-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Jul 6 18:04:49 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-06-14 (22 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" - Alpha amd64 (20130613)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: activity-log-manager
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)