Reminds me of when canononical did something similar with ubuntu and extended searching your applications to searching merchandise on amazon and other stores. It's really funny when you open the start menu equivalent at work to launch the terminal* and as you type "t" you get to see items you can buy - one of them being "The Simpsons". Genius.
* before you complain I use the start menu to launch the terminal: I never remember ubuntu shortcuts, it's meta+t on my system
This behaviour bit me in the ass in work today. Had a new Mac, just installed Polycom (our video conferencing program), typed Polyc<enter> out of habit in spotlight to launch it, ended up on the wikipedia page for polycystic ovarian syndrome...
I rarely use the Spotlight or Start Menu keyboard searching because of stuff like this. If it doesn't reliably produce the right result each time if you only type a small amount of the name - which it doesn't - what's the point?
(Call me crazy, but because of this I've come to not mind the basic Windows 8 start screen. It's not as good as the classic start menu, but compared to the Windows 7 one you can at least arrange it for quick access to a larger number of programs.)
This. I previously loved Spotlight but it's getting strange in its old age. For example, if I type "i" or "it" or "ite" or "iter", Spotlight predicts "iTerm". But if I actually type "iTerm" in full it takes me to "Go2Shell" in the App Store – because it has the word "iterm" in the patch notes of the most recent version. Useful.
With Ubuntu, I had tried to launch brasero, the CD burning application, so I start typing 'bra...' and start seeing ads for women's bras. Thanks Ubuntu, that's helpful.
Which you could turn off without any problems. The issue with Windows 10 that is still being reported is that it searches when you turn that feature off.
* before you complain I use the start menu to launch the terminal: I never remember ubuntu shortcuts, it's meta+t on my system