If there’s one area where Google’s Android platform should blow Apple’s iPhone completely out of the water, it’s search.So Google’s aiming to do just that with the Quick Search Box it released today for Android-based phones. It combines web search with search inside your phone. That means you can look up your personal contacts and do a generic Google search from the same place. It also learns from your prior behavior — if you’ve looked up a specific stock in the past, Android will pre-load the stock in the future as you type in its ticker symbol, and it will automatically refresh the price, too.If you’re searching for information on the web, you don’t have to load a browser or the requisite app. Apple’s iPhone, in contrast, makes you load the weather app to look up local temperatures.What’s also unique is that Android’s search pulls up data from inside apps. It doesn’t just look for titles of apps that match your query.In fact, the designer behind Quick Search Box, Nicholas Jitkoff, is responsible for Quicksilver, a product cherished by Apple fanboys worldwide. Dubbed the “Mac Swiss Army Knife,” Quicksilver made it very fast to find any Mac program, file or folder with a few keystrokes and load it.Too bad Google scooped him up first.

We wrote about Google's Quick Search Box (QSB) a few months ago when the product was officially launched. We found the Twitter plug-in particularly interesting because QSB was able to turn into a Twitter app that let you post Tweets from the search box itself. Now, Google is launching a version of QSB for the Android Phone which provides similar functionality from the phone's home screen. QSB on the Android aims to cut down on keystrokes by providing suggestions as you type and provides a single search box to let you search a variety pf content on your phone, including apps, contacts, and browser history, as well as content from the web, like personalized search suggestions, local business listings, stock quotes, weather, and flight status. And QSB is intuitive; the search box will pull up items that you search for and use most often.