Quick Search Box for Android integrates phone and web searching on your phone
By Dusan Belic on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 1:19 AM PST In Android, Applications
Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has unveiled the Quick Search Box (QSB) for Android, which they say brings a “fast and versatile new system-wide search experience.” Available right from your phone’s home screen, QSB provides suggestions as you type, making searching faster. A few characters is usually all what it takes to search not only for your phone’s contents (apps, contacts, and browser history), but also the web (local business listings, stock quotes, weather, flight status, etc.) — all without opening the browser. QSB even learns from your habits pushing the more used search results higher on the suggestions list.
But wait, there’s more. Near the search field, you’ll also see a microphone icon. Click on it and say what you want to find. You can also say “Call Dusan Belic” and the application will figure out what to do — actually that’s in case you’re speaking English, as QSB doesn’t support other languages at the moment.
Finally, and this is why Google is such a lovable company – QSB allows third party apps to include suggestions in the list. As a result, you may also find the content you want from other apps in the results. In that sense, QSB-enabled apps should soon hit the Android Market, we’ve no doubts about it. That’s for Android 1.6-powered devices, only… And for some demo video, after the jump. Enjoy! 
[Via: Google Mobile Blog]
Yay, android copies the Palm Pre! No seriously, it’s a good thing to copy useful features from other machines. I love the Pre’s ability to type a letter or two and get apps, documents, etc from the launcher. Apps can have keywords that help you find them (”audio” pulls up Music and the Ringtones apps). The voice recognition is a nice improvement, although I bet it’s just a port of the defunct Google Voice Search or Goog411. The surprising thing is that Google didn’t have this earlier in the Android.