Smart scopes is a technology that provides functionality to choose the best set of scopes to present to the user depending on the search term, whether the scope is locally installed or remotely available on Canonical servers.

The "smartness" is achieved by consulting Canonical's Smart Scopes Server with every search query made from the Home view of the Dash.

This technology will be available from Ubuntu 13.10 onwards, and it can be tested already in the Ubuntu "Saucy Salamander" development images, which will eventually become the 13.10 release.

How it all works

The journey starts when the user opens the Dash and types something to search for. The search query will be submitted to both local scopes in the user machine and to remote scopes in the Smart Scopes Server. You can think of scopes as dedicated search engines (e.g. the videos scope will search for videos), whose results can be combined and prioritized before they're presented to the user.

This is where the Smart Scopes Service kicks in: a remote service used by the Home Scope to determine the best matches for Scopes to trigger for a search term. It is also responsible for returning results of any remote scopes for that search term, as well as accepting anonymous metrics generated during that search.