Digital Cheat Sheet

Google's Quick Search Box (available as a separate application for Mac OS X, or as part of Google Desktop for Windows) is a quick search box and so much more. Mac users will note its simplistic similarity to Quicksilver & its even greater similarity to Spotlight, while Windows users will find it even more helpful than the various search tools integrated into the Start Menu (Windows Vista, 7) or the plain old search function (XP). It does allow you to quickly search your computer courtesy of an indexing system I found less resource intensive than both Spotlight and Windows indexing; the results are nearly instantaneous for me once it all gets settled in. But that's not all. The QSB (as Google shortens it from time to time) makes it trivial to launch a certain music file in iTunes, raise or lower system volume, launch an application, search the Web (using Google, of course), search Gmail, and just a bit more. It is a powerful, lightweight application that I have found incredibly stable where others would have choked. Its level of UI customizability is not all that high; you can change the color of the box itself, but no skinning support. However, it has a fairly decent amount of under the hood tweakability that should be kind to general computer users. The best benefit I've found to this is it increases your efficiency by a great amount if you frequently need to find files, applications, or the like, and it really can become an automatic muscle reflex to hit the hot key to bring the quick search box up. So give the documentation a read, see what the QSB can do for you, and try it out today. For Mac users, the QSB is available as a separate download on Google.com for OS X 10.5 and higher, and Google Desktop for Windows users (as well as OS X <10.4) can also be found on Google's site. As always, if a link fails, a well queried Google search will find it.