How to Use Smart Scopes in Ubuntu 13.10

This tutorial focuses on showing the use of one of the new features introduced in Ubuntu 13.10, namely Smart Scopes. With Mir being postponed, Saucy Salamander didn’t have a lot of new features, focusing on stability rather than trying to break new grounds. Smart Scopes is one of the main additions to Dash in Saucy.

gnome-terminal

What are Smart Scopes?

Smart Scopes is a feature implemented in Dash, which lets you improve your search just like you would search in a web browser and you would get real time suggestions while you are still typing.

Smart Scopes show you search results from various local or Internet sources (called “scopes”) as you type. For example, it will show you music results, Wikipedia results, and so on.

To start using Smart Scopes, open Dash (press the Super key – usually the key with the Windows logo), then enter a search term. Here’s an example if you type bucharest:

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Searching for an application:

Modifiers Modifiers are keywords that specify a certain category to search. For example, typing news:ubuntu 13.10 will search for ubuntu 13.10 in the news category.

Using modifiers – news: modifier_news

Using modifiers – weather: modifier_weather

The following is a list of some useful modifiers

news music videos photos help weather

help

Smart Scopes is in constant change, and the relevancy of the results shown will be determined by the number of searches all users perform and the results they are actually interested in.

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