A Quicker Search of Almost Everything

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Mid-January, yet another interesting software project was introduced by the Google labs: the Google Quick Search Box. According to its project page, Google Quick Search Box -- or "QSB" for short -- "is an open source search box that allows you to search data on your computer and across the web". That is a big understatement.

The lead developers of the Quick Search Box project are Nicholas Jitkoff and Dave MacLachlan, and not a single blog post I have read about QSB so far fails to point out that Jitkoff is the mastermind behind Quicksilver, one of the most ingenious productivity utilities available. The current version of QSB is still "just" a developer preview, but it already gives a good idea of where this project is headed, and where its differences to, and similarities with, Quicksilver lie.

This article explains in detail how Quick Search Box works. Hence, if you are already familiar with Quicksilver or its cousins -- Objective Development's LaunchBar or Many Tricks's Butler --, you may wish to skip ahead to the comparison between QSB and Quicksilver.

Finding stuff: basic searching with the Quick Search Box

QSB's basic operation is similar to that of Spotlight: you summon the Quick Search Box with a keyboard shortcut, and as soon as you start typing your search term, QSB starts displaying what it considers the best matches for that search in real time, hinting at the top match in gray letters inside the text entry field.

A fresh search in Google Quick Search Box: the five best matches plus a related Google search are listed; the top match is selected and hinted at in gray type in the search entry field; more matches are accessible via the "More" item; and the path to the selected item is shown at the bottom of the window (which window, unfortunately, cannot be resized).

Via a preference setting you can choose to see the three, five, or ten best matches. If QSB finds more matches, it says so at the bottom of the list, detailing what it has found, e.g., "More[:] 6 Apps, 1 Docs, 1 Other, 2 Webpages". This being an official Google application, the list of best matches always includes an item that queries google.com for the term you have entered and then brings up the standard Google results page in your browser.

On a side note: as I found out when I started using QSB, I often "park" my thumbs on my Mac's Command keys before completing a keyboard shortcut to trigger a command. As a result, QSB often came up even when I didn't want it to, because the default trigger for summoning it is tapping the Command key twice. This problem was easily solved by changing this shortcut, though: I'm using Command-Space now, which I had used previously as my Quicksilver trigger key combo (just in case you're wondering, I've now set Quicksilver to Option-Space, the Spotlight menu to Control-Space, and the Spotlight window to Control-Shift-Space).

Back to using the Google Quick Search Box: via the up and down arrow keys, you can select any of the top matches, or -- by moving the selection downwards beyond the "More..." line -- bring up the complete list of results, which -- again just as in Spotlight -- are sorts neatly by the type of objects found. Even in that list, some search results may be hidden, and by selecting the "Show all [...] ..." line and hitting Return, those hidden items are displayed as well.

Showing 'all' search results, sorted by type.

To open an item, you just hit the Return key: this launches an application, opens a file, visits a URL in the browser, sends a search query to google.com, plays an iTunes track, etc. As a handy navigation aid, at the bottom of the window QSB displays the path to the currently selected item. Clicking on any of this path's segments takes you to that location.

Part of GQSB's core functionality is that it learns what you mean when typing in a search term: whenever you open Mail after searching for "m", that increases the search rank for "Mail" for that search term. After using QSB for a while, the software will, thus, have learned your preferred abbreviations for certain applications, contacts, files, what have you, so that the search results are in line with what you think should be the best-matching for a specific search term.

Selecting search targets: searching in all the right places

QSB lets you choose which types of objects to include in the searches, and in which areas of your hard it should search for files. As examples, the list of Searchable Items in the preferences include your Address Book contacts, your Home Folder, your Documents and Downloads folders, your iChat Buddies, etc. Interestingly, Spotlight Results are also included on that list, so you need only use QSB as your single interface to query both search "engines".

The Searchable Items preferences let you select where to search and which types of data to search for.

The key difference between how the Google Quick Search Box and Spotlight look for matches is that only the latter searches inside files. Which is why I have not activated the Spotlight Results option in QSB, because Spotlight usually finds way too many matches for my searches to be useful. Instead, I use QSB to search by file name, and only if I really need to search the contents of files to find a choice morsel of data do I resort to Spotlight.

In addition to the list of searchable items, QSB offers two additional search-related options, named "Show website suggestions from Google.com" and "Show search suggestions from Google.com". When checked, QSB gathers website and search suggestions for your search term live from google.com and displays them inline with the other search results.

Google website and search suggestions shown inline with other search results.

Just like the google.com website, QSB supports some "special search" features: for example, typing in a U.S. zip code and hitting Return displays the current weather for that location, and there's a built-in calculator that displays the result of a mathematical equation right inside the search field.

The calculator in Quick Search Box: the result is updated live while you type and edit your equation.

Digging for information: refining your search results

A key feature of the Google Quick Search Box, and its most prominent advantage over Spotlight, is that you can easily refine your search by "drilling into" the data. Here's an example: when, after selecting a folder in a search result, you hit Tab (or right-arrow), the results list changes to display the files and folders contained in that folder. Shift-Tab (or left-arrow or Escape) take you back "up" one level, enabling efficient navigation along the whole folder hierarchy.

This also works in a similar fashion for other types of data like music tracks stored in iTunes's library: search for an artist's name, select it in the search results, and hit Tab to see all albums by that artist. Select one of these albums, hit Tab again, and you will see all tracks on that album.

When refining your search this way, QSB essentially changes your search context. Thanks to the Quick Search Box always displaying the previous context -- i.e., the search result that you are "digging into" -- in a lozenge-style box in the text entry field, you always know where you are (see the blue box around "QuickTime Player" in the text entry field in the next screenshot below).

As mentioned earlier, hitting Return will open the selected item in the search results list. However, what makes the Quick Search Box really shine is that, just like Quicksilver, it lets you apply many more actions to the selected search result than just opening it.

Now do something with what you found: applying data-type-dependent actions

When using Spotlight, there are exactly three actions you can apply to an object in the list of search results: open it, reveal it in the Finder, or show its Info box (triggered via clicking / Return, Command-clicking / Command-Return, and Command-I, respectively). The Google Quick Search Box is more flexible in this regard by offering a much broader choice of what to do with the items found during a search. It does so by maintaining "action objects" which appear in red in the search results. Which actions are available depends on the selected item's type.

For files including applications, there are four core actions: Show in Finder, (open in) Quick Look, Get Info, and Open. To apply any of these, hit Tab after selecting a file, and choose the desired action. The real gain in productivity, however, comes from actions that go well beyond this "application launcher" functionality.

Quick Search Box's four core actions for files. Like all actions, they are displayed in red.

Imagine you would like to call a friend of yours at work. That phone number is in your Address Book and you decide to display it in large type on your Mac so you can see it from across the room where your phone is located (for this example's sake, please bear with me for a second here…). With OS X's on-board tools, you would likely search for that contact's name in Spotlight, open the contact in Address Book from Spotlight's search results, grab the mouse and select "Large Type" from the work phone number's context menu (if you haven't stumbled over these menus yet, just left-click on the "home", "work", "mobile", etc. tags in Address Book).

Here's how to achieve the same result with the Quick Search Box: search for the contact's name in QSB, display that contact's details by "drilling down" via the Tab key, select the desired phone number, and apply the "Show Large Type" action. All without ever opening the Address Book application and without taking your hands off the keyboard.

That is a very simple example, so here's one from Quicksilver (that, as of now, is not yet possible with QSB): let's assume you want to email a file to someone. You would open your email client of choice, create an empty email, type in the recipient's name, attach the file, possibly via dragging-and-dropping it from the Finder, and send off that email.

How about this: search for the file in Quicksilver (or, in future, in QSB), search and apply the "Email to..." action, search for the recipient, and up pops a fresh email with the file already attached and the recipient entered in the address field. Takes less time, is more effective, feels more streamlined. Oh, and if you want to attach more than one file, just append your file searches with commas: this works flawlessly even when finding files in different folders.

Actions to adjust the Mac speaker's and iTunes's volume. These are examples for stand-alone actions that are not applied to a search result.

There's more to come: Quick Search Box's support for plug-ins

A key aspect of the Quick Search Box's architecture is that it is based on plug-ins, which allow expanding both QSB's search capabilities as well as adding new actions. Currently stashed away on a Debug pane in the software's preferences, you can browse the list of plug-ins that are included in QSB by default.

The list of plug-ins is displayed on the Debug preferences pane. As of now, there is no way yet, to install additional plug-ins.

Since the code to the Google Quick Search Box is open-source, anyone will be able to write such plug-ins for QSB, and the programmers' imagination is the only limit to what QSB will be able to do with the data on your computer.

Just while I was preparing this post for publication, a new release of QSB showed up in Google Software Update, and a new feature, among others, is support for Twitter: if you have a Twitter account, you can add it on the Accounts preferences pane, and send status updates right from within QSB. While that won't replace a dedicated Twitter client anytime soon, it is a nice proof-of-concept to show in what ways the Quick Search Box can be expanded via just popping in a plug-in.

Father and son: how the Quick Search Box compares to Quicksilver

As mentioned in the intro, one of the two lead developers of the Google Quick Search Box was the person behind Quicksilver. While both share the same core philosophy, there are some key differences between the two -- some of which are very welcome, some not so much.

Quicksilver's search panel features two separate panes for objects (like files, contacts, etc.) and actions. In some cases -- e.g., for the "Open with..." action -- it will display a third pane. Unlike QSB, Quicksilver does not sort the search results by type.

Compared to Quick Search Box, Quicksilver offers...:

More powerful search -- The one difference that Quicksilver users (including myself) will likely consider a major step backwards, is that, in its current implementation, QSB only supports literal searches, and it always starts searching at the beginning of a word. Quicksilver is much more flexible in that it searches inside of words, and it even searches for the individual letters in the search term as long as they occur in the order they were typed in.

Here's what that means in real life: when searching for "cal", QSB might find "calendar" and "too many calories", i.e., any object whose name contains words that start with the literal string "cal". Quicksilver, however, would also find any object whose name contains the individual characters "c", "a", and "l" anywhere in that name, as long as the characters are contained in the name in that order. Thus, in addition to what QSB would find, Quicksilver would also find, say, "iCal", "my name is carl", or even "backup of master image files", as well. (You can see another example in the Quicksilver screenshot above.)

I find Quicksilver's search capabilities extremely handy for using intuitive abbreviations for applications, say "c" for iCal, "du" for Disk Utility or "sd" for SuperDuper!, and I sincerely hope that, eventually, QSB's capabilities will equal Quicksilver's in this regard.

Separate panes for objects and actions -- While QSB combines both objects and actions in a single list, Quicksilver uses dedicated panes for objects and for actions. Thanks to actions showing in red in QSB's results list, they are easy to distinguish from objects, but it remains to be seen if this setup works as well as Quicksilver's separate panes once Quick Search Box supports as many actions as Quicksilver does already.

More flexible search targets -- What parts of hard disk QSB will search are determined by the pre-defined options in the Searchable Items preferences, whereas Quicksilver lets you freely add folders to its catalog of search targets. As a result, QSB cannot search folders located outside your Home folder, because these are not included in the list of Searchable Items. If, for whatever reason, you store important and/or often-used files in the Shared user folder or in non-Mac OS-standard folders, this will be a problem.

It would be nice if QSB would eventually support custom definitions as options for the Searchable Items, ideally in a format that could be easily shared.

Triggers -- Quicksilver supports a selection of triggers like keyboard shortcuts or mouse gestures, which you can use to execute custom actions. This makes some tasks even faster than Quicksilver or QSB already make them, and it is great approach to creating system-wide keyboard shortcuts, for example for launching AppleScripts. This is something I definitely would love to see in QSB.

More complex and complicated preferences -- Quicksilver is a very flexible utility for power users, and this is reflected in the complexity and sheer number of preferences, which easily overwhelms not only new users, but often also stumps seasoned Quicksilver veterans.

Just for triggering and basic search functionality alone, Quicksilver lets you configure all of these settings, making them much more difficult to grasp than the few options Quick Search Box offers.

Jitkoff and MacLachlan have succeeded in massively simplifying the preferences panes in Quick Search Box, and at least to me it does not feel that anything of major importance is missing. If giving up gratuitous configurability -- configuring the exact behavior of how the search field is summoned, what QSB looks like, etc. -- results in making the application simpler to use and also more accessible to new users, I'm all for it.

Downloading plug-ins from within the application -- Quicksilver has a built-in "plug-in store", so downloading and installing plug-ins to expand Quicksilver's feature set is as easy as clicking a check box to activate the respective plug-in: if it is not installed yet when it is activated, Quicksilver just does all the heavy lifting in the background and informs the user as soon as the plug-in is ready for use.

It is probably too early to lament the lack of this feature in the Quick Search Box, but I'm hoping it, too will make it into the release candidate.

Reaching a first-impression verdict: Quick Search Box is something to get excited about

Quick Search Box is still at development preview status: it is not feature-complete, some search results don't make any sense, it crashes, it freezes, and sometimes it just refuses to leave the screen. And yet, I am already very excited about the Google Quick Search Box: its user interface is much cleaner than Quicksilver's, it adds useful new features like central accounts support, and, unlike Quicksilver, it is simple enough to appeal to non-power users. As a result, QSB could bring the productivity promise of Quicksilver to the masses of Mac users.

Considering the differences between both utilities, I hope to see Quicksilver's more flexible search algorithm, keyboard triggers, and "plug-in store" to eventually find their way into QSB without making the user interface, including the preferences panes, any less simple and tidy than they are now.

Additionally, and this is an important point, the user documentation for Quick Search Box definitely must be more complete and easier-to-grasp than Quicksilver's, especially for the plug-ins. True, the basics of using the Google Quick Search Box are very simple and straight-forward. But its true power lies in the functionality offered by the plug-ins, so every single one of them should come with a well-written explanation (that is easy to understand even for an entry-level user) of which types of data supports and which actions it offers. Simply listing how many search interfaces and/or actions a plug-in adds (as shown on the Debug prefs pane in the current version) simply is not enough.

Despite all these things that QSB does not offer just yet, it has already replaced Quicksilver as my primary search UI, and I can't wait to see what the developers will come up with next.

What QSB's future holds: install it, try it, contribute to it

To get started with the Google Quick Search Box, visit its project page on Google Code. In the related wiki, you can get information about first steps with the software. If you feel like contributing to the project, or at least providing constructive feedback, join the GQSB discussion group.

And now for something completely different...

In recent weeks, news about changes at O'Reilly Media have been making the rounds. As part of these changes, all blogs published by O'Reilly will be combined into one central blogging hub. To select posts that cover topics which interest you, you will no longer (have to) visit dedicated sub-sites, but filter a single blog stream via a tag cloud.

Consequently, this post has been my last one for the blog on the Digital Media > Macintosh website Writing for this site has been a lot of fun, and I sincerely hope you found (at least some of) what I wrote worth reading. Having said that, I will use this opportunity to make a personal change as well: while I will keep writing for O'Reilly -- you'll most likely find my posts under the "mac", "audio", or "iphone" tags --, I will no longer blog on a weekly basis, but publish less regularly in favor of more comprehensive and in-depth posts. Maybe I'll see you there?

What will I be up to beyond blogging for O'Reilly? Probably the best way to find that out is to follow me on Twitter. Well, at least until I have taken the dust shields off my personal website again, that is.

Thanks again for stopping by, valued reader. Here's hoping that we'll be seeing each other again in some other corner of the 'Net.

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