Re: Either that or...
I don't know why they took so long to decide to switch it off by default. The results returned by Amazon were never appropriate or relevant (Amazon can barely be relevant with recommendations even when they can identify me as a customer). I was hoping for applications search to be the default scope for some time, not file search, I for one am more excited about that, as it's one of the changes.
Unity 8 Scopes are quite different to Unity7, with several different scope types, most retrieving from one source and others amalgamating the output of the others into one output (e.g. 'Videos').