TUAW First Look: Google Quick Search Box for Mac

By Steve Sande

Google released a new tool for Mac users today. With Google Quick Search Box (QSB), you can perform searches of anything on your Mac or the Web with a few keystrokes. After downloading QSB, I installed it and gave it a test drive on my MacBook Air. After a short first look, I can say that QSB is going to be in constant use on my Macs.

The application takes up about 18 MB of space on your Mac hard disk, and once it is installed a small search box hovers on your screen (see above). You can toggle the presence of the box by pressing Control-Space Bar. The keyboard shortcut, as well as the appearance of the search box, can be customized in a very thorough preferences panel.
Once the search box appears on your screen, you can type anything into the box and QSB will immediately search both your computer and Google for items that are close to your search criteria. Want to search something other than Google? There's quite a list of built-in locations (below):

You can even use QSB as an application launcher. Type in the name of a Mac program and it will show up in the list of search results (below). Press the return key, and it launches that application.

There are plugins available for QSB as well. One, for example, makes it simple to send Twitter messages from QSB by typing in your 140 characters of text beginning with a space. Pressing the tab key allows you to choose which Twitter account you want to send the message from (below). Press return, and the message is sent, and a few seconds later a Growl notification appears confirming the tweet.

Want to search your Mail inbox? Google QSB does that, too. Phrases or words in emails will often show up in search results, and highlighting the results and pressing return not only opens Mail, but highlights all of the entries containing the search words.

While I was writing this post, a massive thunderstorm went through, dumping rain and hail. Can you check weather with Google QSB? See for yourself:

Of course, the dark skies, rolling thunder, and marble-sized hail on the ground should have been a clue about the weather.

I could go on for a while about this cool little application, but I think I'd better serve the TUAW audience by saying "go out and download Google Quick Search Box — now!"

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