The shopping lens in Unity has been one of the most talked about features, not always in a good way. Personally I quite like it, I have purchased several items through it and it seems to be a faster experience at simply finding stuff than using Amazon itself. Producing a lens that makes money clearly caused a lot of people to look up and examine the situation in more depth and it was then discovered that it should have been using https for the transport and issues around privacy and sending search terms off the local machine were raised. All valid issues which have been addressed to a greater or lesser extent, but it got me thinking about privacy Â and prompted me to have a play with Gnome Shell and in due course prompted me to look into Gnome Shell extensions.

You can do cool things with Gnome Shell extensions, they are written in Javascript and can manipulate the user interface in quite flexible ways. One particular type of extension is the search provider – which corresponds pretty well to the Unity lens. There are search providers for wikipedia, virtualbox, ssh and a few other searchable things and today my shopping search provider for Amazon was approved and published.

In simple terms to get the thing running visit the extension page using chromium or a supported version of Firefox whilst running Gnome Shell. This should give you a slider on the left that you can use to activate the extension, this will download and install it inÂ ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/shopping@libertus.co.uk (that looks like an email address, but it isn’t). Once installed you can hit the settings icon on that very same web page to configure the extension – or just hit super and type “a toaster” to search for “toaster” on Amazon (“a” is the default search prefix to tell it you want to do an Amazon search)

Configuring it looks like this:

If you set the keyword to blank then it will function like the Unity shopping lens does – it searches as you type for everything you type. I kind of like the prefix, I know when I want to search on Amazon and when I don’t actively want to do that I am not interested in the performance hit of a redundant search, but you can make up your own mind about that.

The shop domain is the bit after www.amazon and it can be any one of:

co.uk

de

com

ca

fr

co.jp

it

cn

es

Different stores return different products and prices and descriptions.

The affiliate code can be set to anything, gnomestore-20 will give money to Gnome as you shop,Â electronicfro-20 will give money to the EFF, and leaving it as theopesou-21 will give money to the LBF (Libertus Beer Fund).

Why this is not very evil

The user is given control over the affiliate code

It is opt-in for each user of the machine as it is installed in the user home directory.

There is a user controllable keyword prefix for searching

It uses https for transport client to server and server to Amazon

The client side is fully open source

I am being transparent about how it works

It does not use geoIP to decide what Amazon store to use, it does not pass your IP address to Amazon or anywhere else.

I am not interested in logging searches or IP addresses, I plan to monitor logs for a few days to check it is working OK for people then turn off logging altogether for the server.

Enabling this does not require you to enable other online search providers, they are not co-dependent.

Why it is a little bit evil

The server side is not in the control of the user – or published source (it is about 5 lines of code, but includes secret API keys) it is now published in the repository with the client side code, the API keys are in a separate file.

it is now published in the repository with the client side code, the API keys are in a separate file. It uses my affiliate ID as a default

It is sending search queries off the local machine – and has the capacity to log or do evil with all queries typed into the search box (check the code to make sure it doesn’t.Â The code starts executing on every single keystroke, but it gives up if the regular expression with the keyword doesn’t match what you typed).

It gets pictures from Amazon and they could data mine the logs for those and indirectly track your searches that way (highly unlikely – they track you in much more useful ways as soon as you click through to anything you are interested in. Image logs have little informational value.)

It advocates for a materialistic society based on the existential nihilism of unfettered consumerism

How it could be less evil

If someone wants to fork it and run a server on behalf of some foundation that is considered less evil than me then feel free to do so, it is GPLv2 code. What I don’t want you to do is fork the extension and change the default affiliate ID but keep it pointing at my server by default as a back end.

You could run your own local search provider and register for your own API keys if you want to trust nobody but yourself and Amazon. I don’t think you can earn money purchasing items yourself on your own affiliate code so don’t think there is a magical discount facility waiting for you to set it up.

Future enhancements

I would like to make the store list Â a dropdown selection – maybe auto selected based on locale or something. It would be good to provide a list of common affiliate IDs for charities and organisations that people might want to support, but I want to retain the ability for a user to type in one of their own choosing. Maybe it could take a list of affiliate IDs that it uses at random. If you have suggestions then do leave a comment, or fork it on githubÂ https://github.com/AlanBell/shopping-search-provider

Happy shopping (it is the reason for the season) and have a happy new year!