Dash is slow and shows irrelevant results

Solution 1:

You can use a 'low graphics mode' that Ubuntu 12.10 has. This mode disables some dash and launcher effects like active blur and transparency, this make Unity more responsive with a no powerful graphic card.

For activate this mode, you must add following line to ~/.xprofile (if the file doesn't exist, create it):

export UNITY_LOW_GFX_MODE=1

Logout, and come back for the effect to take place. This really works for me :-)

And for stop dash show you Amazon results, you can unistall the lens with:

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

And of course, logout and come back. Grettings!

Solution 2:

To have launchy behaviour with the power of unity dash I recommend you use synapse. synapse uses the same backend zeitgeist engine to crawl all your activity plus application and commandline run. easy to use ans super fast "low on resources" + themeable.

Open a terminal and copy past the PPA:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:synapse-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install synapse

After installation start a gnome classic session and look for the synapse under accessories, configure from the tray icon to auto start and your set with a full replacement of 95% of unity dash functions. add a dock launcher like Cairo-dock or AWN and your set to go with 50% faster experience.

Solution 3:

The very bad performance of the Dash is a bug that appears to have a fix incoming (or already uploaded?). The bug report is at https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1064834 and your question sounds just like you experience this problem. Try to install nux 3.1 and see if it helps.

Like others already pointed out, the irrelevant results from Amazon can be eliminated using

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

and logging out + in again.