Exactly. To remain competitive, Ubuntu needs a global search feature much like iOS, Android, Windows, and OS X have. It's what non-technical users are expecting

Exactly. To remain competitive, Ubuntu needs a global search feature much like iOS, Android, Windows, and OS X have. It's what non-technical users are expecting of a modern operating system. Sending the search result to a central server is required to implement this properly by adding voice recognition for mobile devices, and using data correlation and analysis on the server side to return appropriate and relevant results. With users storing more and more data in the cloud, having a global search box that searches for a particular picture not only locally, but also in my Facebook account, my Ubuntu One, my Flickr, my Dropbox, and my Google+ just makes sense.