Scott McNulty at our sister site The Unofficial Apple Weblog got the scoop on the release of Google Desktop for Mac OS X. The beta software brings over many of the key features from its Windows counterpart, but Google professes this is no ordinary port. Not surprisingly, widgets didn't come along for the ride, but the app looks and feels very native to the Mac platform, and search is lightning fast. In fact, in the thorough review of his first experiences with this initial version, Scott wrote that Google Desktop was sometimes even faster than Apple's own Spotlight at finding some files, though to its credit, Spotlight is capable of searching more information in more files (for example: Spotlight can find text you've written in a layer of a Photoshop file). Also of interest is Google Updater, a new management app for all of Google's Mac products (Google Earth, Google Notifier, etc.) that can alert you when new versions are available, as well as take care of the download and drag-and-drop install process.

Swing on by TUAW and check out Scott's review, or jump ahead and give Google Desktop for the Mac a whirl of your own.