Google’s Quick Search Box on Mac
Posted at 6:54pm EST on 01/13/2009
Google is readying its Mac apps to gain some more market share with OS X users. This time, they are targeting a few well known apps, such as Quicksilver. Google has created their own Quick Search Box (QSB). But, the kicker is that it’s open source. Want to download the code and launch your own quick search box? Then go for it.
This 2.9mb dmg file may be a waste of your storage, but let’s take a look at it.
First, Google wants to get your permission for usage statisstics. In short, asking, “are people really using this app?” to see if it’s even a good investment of their time.
That’s fairly typical of software-based apps for Google, so let’s move on to functionality.
One cool thing I noticed is that this QSB is completely integrated into your address book. Here is what it looks like when you do a search for a name that is in your address book.
It’s fairly useful because you can quickly look for contacts and see all related files on your computer about that person.
But here is what is really interesting.
This little bit just reconfirms my claim that Google gives Wikipedia too much love.
You can search Google Image Search, Google News, Google Product Search (formerly known as Froogle), Wikipedia, Google Docs, and YouTube. Wikipedia is the only non-Google product you can search — on the default list.
This just proves that Google is in bed with Wikipedia. If we were to ever see a day that Wikipedia were to start serving ads on their ad-free dictionary, you can rest assured that the entire ad inventory would go directly to Google. They would not pass Yahoo! or MSN, but go directly to Google.
Google has been very subtle with hints over time about their relationship with Wikipedia, but we have yet to see any kind of reciprocal love back to Google.
Enough about my Google and Wikipedia rant though.
The QSB doesn’t seem too impressive. It’s fairly basic and you could save 1mb and do the same job by using Quicksilver.
