QuickSilver, for those who are unfamiliar, is one of the greatest software utility on Mac. On its most basic level, it is a text-based application launcher. With some experience with its more intricate features, you can select and copy multiple files from different locations, append text into files, create drawers for multiple copy and paste as well as storing text clippings. Some people would go as far as getting rid of OS X’s dock altogether and base their entire workflow on just QuickSilver alone.
In the past year though, the development of QuickSilver came to a grinding halt. It was put into the open source community but received very little attention since. The original developer of QuickSilver now works for Google’s Mac division, and has been focused on other projects. So imagine my excitement when I came across the article on Smoking Apples Blog that the same developer has unveiled his latest project, Google Quick Search for the Mac.
I immediately switched over and messed with Google Quick Search for about two days. For a very early beta, Google Quicks Search shows some promise, but I still prefer QuickSilver by a fair margin.
The Good:
- Google Quick Search is easier to use for the first time user. The straight forward presentation of search results are easy to understand.
- For the advanced user who wants to perform specific action on search results, QuickSilver does this with two-to-three panels, where the first panel is the search result, second panel performs action with third panel for any additional action. By default, the second panel action is “open”, which works well for the application launching aspect of QuickSilver. However, to learn how to perform additional actions and drill deeper into menus becomes a convoluted key combination of arrows and tabs. GQS does better in this regard, because all the items are organized in a single view. You can drill down into deeper action menus in very consistent manner, and the presentation isn’t necessarily limited to only three panels.
- GQS also allows performing web searches more straight forward. In QuickSilver, you have to first install the web search plugin. Type in the name of the appropriate search engine, then tab over to the text field (third panel) to type in the search text. In GQS, performing web searches with your default browser is just a key press away.
The Bad:
- QuickSilver is a desktop search tool first, with some web featured attached via plugin. So by default it does what I want it to do, which is search for documents and applications on my local folder. GQS has a mixed approach to presenting some applications/folders/documents, with some links to search for text on Google. Sometimes, even searching for applications that’s simply in the default application folder, will end up with web searches as the first result. For example, I typed in “adium” when I first installed GQS, and my default option was “search for ‘adium’ on google”. Of course, these results do improve overtime as GQS learns which result you care about more; but the default for a desktop searching app should be what’s on my desktop, not the web.
- Related problem to issue #1, is that to some extent, you can never really get what you want in the results because of the way web search options are mixed in with local options. I typed in “log” and came up with three folders named “log” in my results, but none of the three is the log folder I was looking for. Drilling down deeper into local results, I finally found the correct log folder as the #6 choice. The problem is, I look for the other log folder quite often as well, so as long as GQS insists on displaying the top 3 local search results mixed in with their own web search options, I’ll probably be looking for the wrong log folder half of the time.
- QuickSilver also maintains its own index, as opposed to relying on hooking to Spotlight for its searches. The downside is that QuickSilver only index folders you tell it to look into (by default it looks for Application & Documents, for the most part, all you need), while you can still use it to manually navigate into folders that you don’t index. GQS’s hook into Spotlight allows it to look for everything and anything on your hard drive, but that means the performance suffers. Just about every search result I attempted with GQS resulted in a few seconds of lag while it processed Spotlight results. It’s really not a huge amount of time, except I’m completely spoiled by QuickSilver’s instantaneous response. You don’t have an option to turn Spotlight off, because there are no way to index individual folders within its preferences right now, and if you turn Spotlight searches off, GQS will only display web search options.
Google Quick Search also suffers from a lot of instability issues currently. At one point it was hanging while consuming an increasing amount of memory, by the time I noticed it and force the application to shut down from Activity Monitor, it was using up 360MB of RAM, while consuming 99% of all the processing cycles on one of my cores. Keep in mind that this is a really, really early beta, so I assume that the performance issue will be fixed over time. Given the popularity of this download already, I hope it’s relatively quick.
However, whether or not they will change some interface behavior issues (for example, making web search results a secondary option on a different keypress, ability to monitor folders instead of relying on Spotlight) remains to be seen.
For now, I’m sticking with QuickSilver, it is still more robust & flexible, and I’ve already endured the learning curve.
