How To Disable Amazon / Shopping Suggestions And Other Unity Scopes In Ubuntu 13.10

In Ubuntu 13.04, if you want to get online search results in Dash without shopping suggestions, you can simply remove the Unity Shopping lens. In Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) you can't remove the Shopping lens but there is another way to achieve the same thing and it seems this isn't obvious because I've seen quite a few users complaining about it. So here's how to disable the shopping scopes or any scope for that matter, in Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander, without disabling all the online search results.

Unity Dash with shopping suggestion

First of all, don't try to remove the Unity Shopping Lens in Ubuntu 13.10 because it won't work. Here's what you'll get if you try that:

$ sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'unity-scope-home' instead of 'unity-lens-shopping'
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

If you remove unity-scope-home, which was selected instead of unity-lens-shopping, you won't get any results in Dash, not even for installed applications.

You can't remove the Unity Shopping Lens in Ubuntu 13.10 because there's no Shopping lens. Ubuntu 13.10 comes with a feature called Unity Smart Scopes (or "100 scopes") which uses a huge list of scopes to display results in Dash and among these, there are some used for shopping. So if you don't want shopping suggestions in Dash, you must disable these shopping scopes (see below).

Unity Dash without shopping suggestions

How to disable Unity Dash plugins (scopes) in Ubuntu 13.10

To disable a Dash plugin (scope) in Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander, open Dash, go to the Applications lens (either do it manually using your mouse or use the Super + A keyboard shortcut), click "Filter results" on the right and under "Type", select "Search plugins". All the Dash search plugins (scopes) should be listed, like in the screenshot below:

Dash plugins (scopes)

To disable a plugin, click on it and then click the "Disable" button:

Later on you can enable them back in the same way.

Disable the Amazon / shopping suggestions Unity Dash scopes

If you don't want shopping suggestions in Dash, disable the following scopes (by using the instructions above): Amazon, Ebay, Music Store, Popular Tracks Online, Skimlinks, Ubuntu One Music Search and Ubuntu Shop.

To disable all these shopping Dash plugins/scopes from the command line, use the following command:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Lenses disabled-scopes "['more_suggestions-amazon.scope', 'more_suggestions-u1ms.scope', 'more_suggestions-populartracks.scope', 'music-musicstore.scope', 'more_suggestions-ebay.scope', 'more_suggestions-ubuntushop.scope', 'more_suggestions-skimlinks.scope']"

inspired by MarcosBox