Google Buddy - the Easy Way to Search Google Right from Your Desktop

Google has become so much a part of everyday life that the word "Google" has become a verb. Who hasn't "Googled" something? Of course, to use Google you need to open up a web browser and go to Google's home page. Or else, if you use Safari, Firefox, or any of the more modern browsers, you can set the search bar in the toolbar to use Google, and search that way.

But what if there was a better way? What if you didn't need to load the browser first, and THEN do your search? What if you could initiate a Google search straight from your desktop, and have your web browser open up, not to a blank page, but to the Google search results page?

With a Mac running OS X and a fantastic utility called Google Buddy, you can do just that.

Google Buddy is an inexpensive piece of shareware (it sells for only $11.95), that can be downloaded and tried out for 30 days from Recurring Dream Software. In my testing, Google Buddy worked exactly the way I would have expected it to, and even did a few things that caught me completely off guard.

When you start up Google Buddy, a new icon is added to your Mac menu bar. You'll immediately recognize it as the blue Spotlight icon that inhabits the upper-right corner of your menu bar, only colored in Google's standard blue, red, yellow and green color scheme. Clicking the icon brings up a search box that looks identical to the Spotlight search box as well. However, unlike Spotlight, which searches your hard drive, typing in a search string and hitting return in Google Buddy immediately launches your default web browser and loads Google with the results to your query.

In my mind, after reading the blurb about Google Buddy, this was exactly what I had expected Google Buddy to do. Once I started using Google Buddy, however, I was surprised to see that not only does it search the main Google page, but it can also perform more specialized searches as well.