No it was not. There were Lenses that were advertised as non-local searches, yes, but the main Lens was (to my recollection) not one of them.
What actually happened was that Canonical took the main search bar (which had traditionally been designed to search for local files and programs) and stuck Amazon search results in it. Then, when users (like myself) recommended the reasonable approach of "just stick the Amazon stuff in a dedicated Shopping Lens and leave the main Lens for local searches like it was before", Shuttleworth and friends doubled down.
Before that point, I was a happy Ubuntu user who - though I liked Gnome2 a lot - was at least willing to use Unity. After that point, I stopped using Ubuntu entirely and started my quest to find a new distro (Mint → Debian → Fedora → Gentoo → Arch → Slackware → Debian again → openSUSE → Slackware).
The label got changed to "Search your computer and online sources". I believe this was after a few iterations. I don't remember the original text, but I think it's clear that there was no intention to mislead users.
Your problem is that you viewed it as an internal search, when it was designed and advertised as a global search.
If you want to argue that the global search should have been an internal search, that's fine. If you imply that the search was an internal search, though, then that's misleading FUD.