Damian Nicholson

Like a lot people who own a mac, when this announcement came out, I feverishly downloaded the Google Quick Search Box.

Being a regular Quicksilver user for quite some time now, I was eager to see what the big G-Man could bring to the table. My initial impressions can be summed up in one word…SLOW!

As mentioned in my previous post on my current setup, I had recently upgraded my mac to 4gigs of ram, so I was sure as hell it wasn’t my machine that was causing the lag. No worries, I was willing to wait the second or more before search box appeared onscreen. I started typing, and even then the responses generated weren’t anywhere near as fast as Quicksilver.

It’s weird, but there are times when UX professionals talk about feedback and how being too instantaneous is a bad thing, I beg to differ when it comes to regular users of a system. I think the faster something is, the easier and more productive an adept user can do what they wish to carry out. It also instills more confidence in the person using the system.

Back to the Google Quick Search Box(GQSB) – I had also heard that the thing crashed a wee bit…yeah that happened too. Being a beta product, similar to all Google’s creations for that matter, I expected a few bugs to be present. So it crashed every now and again, no biggy. I’ve had to deal with worse things on more than one occassion in the past.

I persevered, and after a little while the GQSB began to grow on me.

Background Info

It turns out the original creator of Quicksilver ended up working for Google, this being his new pet project to aid them in their quest for world domination. Being the case, the future of Quicksilver doesn’t look good.

My beef with Quicksilver

The fact is, Quicksilver is still awesome, though I figure I fall into the “casual” category of users who mainly used it to launch apps and files or directories in finder, in conjunction to using the iTunes plugin. I’m sure there are a million and one other ways Quicksilver can and is currently being used, but setting up and remembering all the triggers to allow me to do so seemed like too much hard work.

What’s wrong with Spotlight?

During the early stages of trying out the GQSB, I realised that when I got my mac early last year, I never got the chance to take Spotlight for a good spin. Well that’s precisely what I did, and I’m pleasantly suprised at how good it is. Spotlight can be invoked via the Command + Spacebar for those of you unaware, and I’d say it’s faster than Quicksilver ever was. Infact I can’t really fault Spotlight at all, other than it doesn’t seem to “learn” the frequent triggers that I search for; placing them at the same point in the list of top matches as the first day I searched for them.

Roundup and Conclusion

Since I’m not happy with Spotlight alone, I’m opting to stay with the GQSB, mainly for the reason that I know that its future is going to be in good hands. It’s Google for crying out loud! Here I am complaining about the speed of searching my scanty latop, when Google do search better than anyone else on the planet.

Sure it doesn’t recognise that I want to launch TextMate when I type “mate” in, unlike Spotlight and Quicksilver, but I’m willing to put up with that. Even in the short amount of time I’ve been using the GQSB for, the G-Man released a very welcome update to stop the thing crashing, wicked!

You can also bet your wages on it integrating with all the other nifty Google stuff in due course.

So what’s your take?