Toolbars are not exactly new these days – several search engines have them, the most well known one of course being Google. In fact, the Google toolbar is what finally kicked me over from using AltaVista – it made searching a lot easier, because all I had to do was type my search into the little search box and away I went.
I’ve used the Google Toolbar ever since; I do it pretty much automatically these days and I get confused for a few seconds if I’m using a computer that doesn’t have it installed on the browser. In fact, I’m quite surprised at the number of people who don’t use it, since it makes life so much easier.
This is a short report on what I’ve found so far, and for those of you who don’t currently use it I’ve also tried to indicate new features as well, just in case you fancy trying the current version.
You can download the toolbar from
http://toolbar.google.com/googlebar.html and the installation was quick and easy. In order to run it your
computer needs to be using Microsoft Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP or 2003
Server with MSIE version 5 or later. I’m using ADSL and the download and
automatic install over my current version took less than 30 seconds. One thing
that you should be aware of is that to use some of the advanced functions of
the toolbar it’s a requirement that you allow the toolbar to
‘talk’ to Google to let the search engine know what pages you’re
viewing. It does this anonymously (well, if you want to be pedantic that’s
what they say…) but I know that some people get a little freaky about
this. You can disallow this function, but it does mean that you won’t be
able to use all of the functionality of the toolbar, which seems a shame, but
it’s your choice of course.
If you use Firefox, you can also
download a copy of it from that same URL or from
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=firefox
The toolbar has a number of functions, which I’ll go through in turn.
This is a small search box on the left hand side in which you type your search terms (there’s a surprise!). If you click on the down arrow next to the box you can view the last 20 searches that you ran, and can if necessary click on one of them to re-run it, which I find extremely helpful. There’s also an option (which I think is new to this version, at least I’ve not seen it before, which allows you to clear the search history. Useful if you’ve been searching something you shouldn’t and don’t want the boss to know!) The search defaults to the Google easy or simple search function, but it’s possible to move directly to any of the other Google search functions such as Advanced, Groups, Images and so on, simply by clicking on the ‘Google’ button on the very extreme left of the toolbar. It’s a nice simple straightforward function that’s always appealed to me
To the right of the search box is the ‘Search web’ button, which you can click when you’ve typed in your search. Alternatively you can use the pull down menu to utilise the ‘I’m Feeling lucky’ option, just search for your term(s) within the site that you happen to be on (which has to be useful, though of course limited to those pages that Google is aware of), or you can search Dictionary.com for a particular word.
These functions are of course very useful – they allow you to get to places in Google quicker and easier than remembering URL’s, or following links or even pulling down your list of favorites. There are some interesting new additions though which deserve a mention. Firstly you can now get to the Google Zeitgeist page, which is one that I always forget about, but which is full of interesting titbits relating to popular searches, searches decreasing in popularity, top image queries, international queries and so on. I’m never sure just how useful it is, but it’s fun to browse through now and then. There’s also a link to Blogger.com which is no surprise, given Googles recent acquisition, and is further supplemented by the addition of a ‘Blog it’ icon on the toolbar which allows users of Blogger to quickly and easily add something to their blogs directly from the webpage they happen to be looking at. This feature has been available for some time via Blogger.com but it’s nice to see it included. There’s also an option to save your search preferences, and it was only when I clicked on this that I realised that my preferences weren’t quite what I thought (I had filtering turned to moderate, which I hadn’t realised. No wonder I wasn’t seeing stuff that other people had been complaining about!). Finally there is an ‘Options’ button, which allows you to change just about anything and everything to do with the toolbar. In fact, it’s so comprehensive I’ll return to discuss it later.
Moving along the Toolbar, the next icon up by default in the News icon, which takes you directly to the news page. It would be nice if this had been integrated with the search option; it seems logical to me that I should be able to type a term into the search box and click on the ‘News’ icon, but if I do this my search term is ignored, and I just go directly to the Google News home page. To be fair, I can achieve exactly what I want by choosing a term and then using the pulldown menu to chose Google News to run my search that way.
Page Rank is the next icon on the Toolbar. This is a small icon, based on a sliding scale, of how important Google thinks a particular page happens to be. It’s useful for searchers who want a quick indication of authority (though it’s easy enough to misunderstand, so I wouldn’t want to push this too far!), and it’s also used by website developers for relevance ranking purposes. I find it interesting, but I think most people could turn it off without causing any major trauma in their lives.
The next icon which I activated for myself, which is a default in the current version but not in the new beta version is the option to query Google about the site you happen to be on. Simply clicking on the icon gives you the opportunity to see Google’s cached snapshot of the page, similar pages, backwards links and the opportunity to translate the page into English. (As an aside, I’ve never tried to get Google to translate a page already in English into English. It’s got to be an experiment worth trying sometime!) I’ve always liked this particular function since it’s useful for authority checking, and to see what the general internet community thinks about a particular page or site.
A new feature is next, and I think it’s the one that is really going to have them rocking in the aisles. It’s an automatic pop-up killer. I already have a popup killer, which works very well, but I’m always forgetting to turn it on – I don’t have it set as a default, mainly because I run so many applications and don’t have that much free memory to spare. This is delightful though, since it does the job neatly and without any fuss. When it blocks a popup it lets you know by sounding a little chime, the cursor briefly changes and the count on the blocker is increased by one. If you wish to allow popups for a particular site (if for example it uses popups for help screens) it’s easy to turn it off for that site, and then back on again when you leave. What I haven’t been able to find yet though is any way of seeing a list of exactly what I’ve blocked, or a way of unblocking a specific popup that I may have blocked in the past. Consequently, while I think this is a very useful function I’d prefer to see a little more flexibility, but there is no doubt that it’s going to prove a very popular feature with users.
Another new option is ‘Autofill’ which you can use to, well, autofill forms. If you get fed up of typing in your name and address details you can get autofill to do this for you. It can even remember your credit card details and input those as well, though to be honest, having a little utility that can remember all that is just asking for trouble! While you can set a password for this particular application it’s one that I think in the main I’ll leave well alone.
Automatic highlighting of search terms is another icon that I find invaluable. In fact, there are two ways in which this works on the toolbar. The first icon (in the form of a highlighter pen) simply highlights (in various garish colours) all the terms that you’ve searched for on the page. The second approach is that your search terms are temporarily added to the toolbar and you can click on them individually and you’ll be taken to the section of the webpage that the term appears. Both approaches are simple and easily implemented and very useful indeed; I find them invaluable.
Well, that’s the default for the Toolbar, but as I mentioned earlier, there is an ‘Options’ facility, and I’ve done a bit of poking around in it. I have to say, there’s a great deal hidden in there; more options, autofill details and so on. First up is the option of choosing which version of Google you search with. Most people will chose the .com version I should imagine, but there are all the various country versions including .co.uk. So many in fact, that I just gave up counting! Other basic options were the ability to open a new window to display the results every time you search (no thanks Google, I’ve usually got more than enough windows open at any moment in time as it is), options to turn on/off page ranking, page information, and all the other features that I’ve mentioned, such as the Blogger icon, news and popup killer.
The ‘More’ option is truly impressive, giving you the ability to add icons such as ‘I’m feeling lucky’, search images, search groups icons and so on. Of course, you can get these via the pull-down menus, but it’s very nice to have them available as icons. There are also a number of other options that are pretty much hidden; one example being Google Compute, which is a little like the Seti@home project in that it allows your computer to be used to help compute data on a large scale. It’s a nice idea, and in theory I have nothing against it, but I’d rather I kept a little more control over my computer, if it’s all the same. Fortunately it is, since it’s an option that’s turned off by default. Another hidden option is a voting button – you can either vote for or against a particular page. At the moment my understanding is that Google isn’t proactively using this information, but I can see that they may well do in the longer term, and use it to assist in working out page rankings. There are a few other options, but I’ve pretty much covered the main ones.
It’s very early days yet, and I’ve hardly used the new version; in fact only enough to be able to write about it! However, I’m favourably impressed; I like the new features and I think they’ll prove popular. It’s easy to install and run (perhaps too easy; it would be a simple matter to play around with the options, particularly on a public access computer) and is very unobtrusive. It incorporates a lot of the functionality of the search engine and is an almost perfect companion to it, which is the whole point. A definite thumbs up at this stage, but I reserve the right to change my opinion when I’ve played with it some more!