Most search engines these days have a toolbar option available for their users. They all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Firstly, it makes life easier when it comes to searching – it’s not necessary to actually visit the home page of the search engine, you can just click in the appropriate little box, type your search and off you go. Most toolbars have a variety of other features as well; the obligatory pop-up killer, the option of highlighting on a page and so on. One of the major disadvantages however is that it does tend to tie the user into a particular search engine, which of course is exactly what the provider wants to happen. An excellent overview of toolbars, written by Greg Notess, is available at http://www.infotoday.com/online/jan04/OnTheNet.shtmlif you want to do a little research. I’ve also written my own overview of the Google Toolbar at http://www.philb.com/gtoolbar.htm. Recently, Amazon have launched their own search engine, A9, which is currently (as of April 2004) in beta test, and they’ve also launched their own toolbar to go with it. I installed it and have had a chance to play with it, and thought it would be interesting to do a comparison of the two.
The installation of both toolbars is very straightforward; just click on the download option and run the setup program. Both work easily with MSIE 5.5 or later, and they install themselves neatly without any problem at all; at least on my machine! If you’re using another browser however, you may find that it isn’t supported by the toolbar, which obviously means you’ll either have to do without, or switch. Installation took about 15 seconds.
Both can easily and quickly be uninstalled, so if you just want to try either of them out, then realise that you don’t like them, they’re very easy to get rid of again.
The Google version wins hands down here; there really isn’t any contest. It’s much more flexible, with more options available to it. Let’s look at each one in turn.
Clicking on the Google icon on the left hand side of the toolbar allows you to go straight to 11 different options, including the advanced search, images, groups, news, search preferences and so on. The A9 version just provides access to different aspects of the toolbar, which isn’t that much of a surprise, given that it doesn’t have the same breadth of functionality that Google offers.
The search box is just a search box – type in what you want to look for, and hit search.
The next option, which is a small down arrow to the side of the ‘search web’ button provides access to other features of the toolbar. The Google version (from now on referred to as GV) gives 10 options, some repeated from the Google icon. These are useful, such as the ability to search the site you’re looking at, or the Dictionary option, which takes you to http://www.dictionary.com which I personally quite like. A9 does have a rather different set of options here – obviously there is an emphasis on searching the main Amazon site, but it also allows direct search access to Google, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary (which isn’t in my opinion as good as Dictionary.com), but also lets you search the Merriam-Webster thesaurus and the Internet Movie Database.
Both allow you to highlight keywords on the page, although A9 has the advantage of allowing users to not only highlight, but to jump to each occurrence of the word, while the GV simply highlights all of them. I found this much more useful, particularly when looking at a long web page.
A9 has a new feature, which allows you to view your search history (if you’re logged in), and you can also edit it to remove searches that you don’t want to keep. Irritatingly however, it’s only available when you are on an external website. My home page is one that I wrote, with links to the sites that I most often use, and when I’m on that, the history function is greyed out, which is annoying, since I might want to go directly to a previously run search. I can look at the last few searches I ran from the pull down menu in the search box, but it’s not as convenient, nor does it contain a complete listing of the search history. This seems to be a rather silly omission by A9. However, I can’t be too critical of the function, since it is at least provided, unlike the GV, which only allows me to view the searches that I’ve recently run from their search box.
Another excellent function that the A9 toolbar makes available is the ‘diary’ function. Quite why they’ve decided to call it a diary is a little beyond me, since it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a notes function that allows you to annotate particular pages that you’ve found. It works by opening a small box below the toolbar, allowing you to make any comments you choose about the page you’re currently on. When you return to that page in the future, these notes are immediately displayed, though I’ve not found a way of manually stopping this happening; if you make a note, it’s displayed, and the only way you can get rid of it is to delete the entire note. There’s also an option to display all of your notes as well.
Both toolbars provide information about the page that you are currently looking at, though the actual information provided differs. The GV offers a cached version, similar pages, backwards links and a translation function. A9 has an agreement with Alexa to use data from their resources, so you can obtain information about which other sites people who visit the site you’re looking go to and site statistics. However, since this information is based on the number of people who use the Alexa toolbar a lot of this information is suspect, and shouldn’t really be relied upon.
Both toolbars have popup killers, though I found the GV much more sensible – click to allow popups on a page or click to disallow them. The A9 version seems to require me to type in the URL, which is a much more long winded way of doing it.
As far as all those options go, the A9 version compares very favourably with the GV, and in some cases better performs. However, the GV is much more flexible, since it has a great many more options. Chief among these for me is the ability to see the Google Page Rank of a site, which is helpful for search engine optimisation, and the Blogger icon, which makes it easier for me to add things to my weblog. Admittedly however, they will be of limited use to anyone who isn’t interested in such things. However, there are other things the GV offers, such as a display of the search terms used on the toolbar, which does allow a user to jump down through a page to each time the term is used, getting over the highlighter problem previously mentioned. For example, there are more options for searching, buttons for various web based activities and an autofill box.
Both toolbars do the job that they’re supposed to very well. They’re clear, easy to use and intuitive. Since I’m primarily a searcher (and a Blogger) I find the Google toolbar fits much more closely to my own needs. However, if I used Amazon more extensively, I’d almost certainly consider swopping over to it. If you’re not sure, it’s certainly worth the few minutes of your time to try it out.