MacMonth: Inquisitor 3
Because it lacks a plugin architecture like Firefox, Safari has relatively few add-ons or extra tools. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any add-ons though, and there’s some great ones too, like Inquisitor which adds a Spotlight-like features to Safari’s Google Search bar.
I’ll confess I don’t like Spotlight and I hardly ever use it so I wasn’t looking forward to Inquisitor, but I was wrong. Where Spotlight is slow, clumsy and to me, useless, Inquisitor is fast, easy-to-use and makes searching the web easier.
Once installed, just type in the Google search box and the Inquisitor window will pop up with the top search results and attempt to auto-complete your word or phase. By default Inquisitor shows the top 3 Google results, but you can customize that number via Safari’s preferences window.
Just below the results is a list of auto-complete suggestions and if you enable the feature, below that you’ll see links to other search sites. The Search engine sites themselves are limited to offerings from Google or Yahoo, which I assume is because both offer good, stable APIs.
You can add as many search engines as you’d like to the “additional search engines” links and add keyboard shortcuts as well. It would be nice if the custom search engines could have a postfix string appended to them, but that’s about my only quibble with this little gem.
The version of Inquisitor 3 that I’s using is still officially a beta (currently beta 2), but I had no stability issues and haven’t seen any bugs in my testing. Inquisitor is a great little app and it’s free, though I’m sure developer Dave Watanabe wouldn’t complain if you donated something toward future development.
