Google releases Quick Search Box for Mac
Billed as an extension to Google Desktop, the Quick Search Box lets you launch applications from the search results, in addition to finding documents and Web sites.
Google has released a new Mac application that lets users search both their Macs and the Web in the same window as well as launch applications.
Google Quick Search Box was unveiled in January, but is now ready for a formal release, Google announced on its Mac Blog. It's a pretty lightweight application that Mac users can use as a universal search tool to find local documents, applications or Web sites featuring a certain term: for example, a query for "Wilco" allowed me to launch my iTunes library of Wilco songs, read news stories about the band, and find images.
It's basically a Googlized front end on Mac OS X's Spotlight search, according to a Web page explaining the difference between Google Desktop and Google Quick Search Box. The main difference between the two Google products is that you can launch applications from the Quick Search Box, which isn't possible in Google Desktop.
Techcrunch noticed that you can also use Google Quick Search Box as a Twitter client, because the world apparently needed yet another Twitter client. It doesn't appear that you can use Quick Search Box to actually do real-time searches of Twitter, however, which was the subject of much of the speculation regarding Google's potential interest in Twitter.