Google Importer Freeware Brings Google Results Into Spotlight

Originally downloaded 5/1/06. What an interesting idea! At first, I thought it sounded silly, but once I looked at the results and thought about it more, it seems perfectly logical. This is the missing piece of Spotlight, in some ways… searching the web as well as your hard drive! This freeware is configurable as a preference pane. Definitely worth a try!

Update 2/22/07. Since installing this Spotlight add-on and its system Preference Pane, seeing Google search results show up in my regular Spotlight result list is something I take for granted. Once you understand that Google Importer will organize the Google search hits in a separate section labeled “Bookmarks,” it’ll make more sense. At first, I didn’t realize that I was seeing Google hits… I thought Spotlight was indexing my Safari bookmarks! The preference pane gives you some useful customization options, including turning the Google results off. You can specify how many results to return and can opt to see a link to the full Google results list. In addition, you can restrict the Google search to one particular website rather than whole Internet. This option would be more useful if you could modify it without having to open the preference pane each time, but it’s nice to know it’s possible. This is definitely one of the free Spotlight enhancements that are worth making.

Version as tested: 1.0.1.