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Earlier today, Google unveiled its ‘Quick Search Box’ for Mac OS X, an application that offers search functionality across users’ computer files and allows them to perform specific actions on the results based on their file extension.

Google relased the Mac version of Google Desktop about two years ago, but the software now supports additional functionality that blends together results from files, programs and browsing history, like the OS X integrated Spotlight Search feature already does.

“Once you’ve found the result you want, we wanted you to be able to DO something with it,” a Google spokesman wrote on the company’s official blog. “To find out what you can do, select a result and press the tab key or the right arrow on the keyboard. Some examples of actions include instant messaging friends, playing a song, or emailing a URL. Just like the data you can search over, the list of actions you can perform will grow over time!”

Google is in fact making the tool extensible by third parties that want to develop add-ons to make use of the data and allow for further actions on the documents, which should make this tool all the more interesting as time goes by.

As a first and sample plugin, Google has developed a Quick Search Box extension that allows users to easily post on Twitter directly from the software, then further encouraging developers to write similar extensions saying that the entire search box is open source and released under the terms of the Gnu Public License.

Even more interestingly, Google Quick Search Box’s results will also depend on previous searches, which will be stored in a local cache for improved performance, which should speed up the process of finding files that have been used or are used more often.

As with its Windows counterpart, Quick Search Box suggests searching Google’s properties — such as Search or YouTube — whenever the query typed by the user doesn’t have any close match in the files of system on which it is running.

The tool can even yield search suggestions for both Google and internal document searches, returning closest matches for misspelled words, which Apple’s Spotlight doesn’t currently do as well.

Google Quick Search Box’s default keyboard shortcut is Control-Spacebar, which closely recalls the Command-Spacebar combination used to bring up Spotlight search. Apart from keyboard shortcuts, users will also be able to customize the aspect and the kind of documents that the tool will have to search when a query is being typed.