Download the Google toolbar today. (google.com)

Member Name: mikeb

Product:	google.com
Date:	11/02/01 (1064 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No need to leave the site you're on to do your Google search.

Disadvantages: Slightly smaller browser window as a result of toolbar.

Did you know you can now get a Google toolbar download for Internet Explorer? If you did you might want to give this opinion a miss. If not let me give you the background to my question.

I’ve tried many search engines over my five years of using the internet, including most of the well known ones, Infoseek, Yahoo, Alta Vista etc but in recent weeks I’ve formed the impression that Google is probably the best of the lot.

After using Google for the last couple of months in comparison with my previous bookmarked search engines, I am now convinced that Google consistantly delivers better and more relevant results. Being curious as to how they did this and what criteria they use to deliver these results I decided to visit the All About Google link on their homepage. I also thought that this would help me to refine my searches better for the future.

I read the basic search tips guide which had several useful ideas as to how to improve the quality of the results you get from the search. This page is well worth a visit for anybody who is already using Google as I’m sure, like me, most people just enter a couple of words and hope for the best. If you use these tips I’m sure it could save you alot of time. This is not the reason I wrote this op, however, it was because of something else I spotted.

What I also noticed on the All About Google page was an offer to get the Google Toolbar for the Internet Explorer browser which claimed you could then take Google with you anywhere on the web. I clicked on the available link for more details to discover that the Toolbar was a small download which automatically attaches itself to the IE browser. The benefits of this were explained as:-


The Google search box would be available from any webpage.

You can search the pages of the site you are visiting.

It will display the Google ranking of the page you are visiting.

More details of the p
age you are visiting can be accessed including -
Similar pages.
Pages that link to your current page.
A cached snapshot of the page.

Your search terms can be highlighted on the page as they appear, each in different colours.

A find function is available to search for words that appear anywhere on the page.


All of these and other features could be customized into the Google toolbar, apparently. The system requirements were Windows 95, 98, ME, NT or 2000 and Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater. It sounded OK to me so I decided to give it a try and clicked on the appropriate link. The download screen had the regular terms and conditions box and a note in red that told me it had detected that my browser was IE 5.0 and warning me that some early versions of this had a problem with support for toolbars. There was an easy fix for it anyway so I proceeded with the download.

There was yet another information page which basically said that if all the Google toolbars advanced features were turned on, the address or URL of the page I was visiting would be sent to Google so that these features could be used. This note was mainly to emphasise that Google valued the privacy of their users and although the URL was sent, this did not actually identify other details like name and e-mail address to Google. Two options followed one to install with advanced features and one without, I chose with because you can always turn it off at a later date if desired.

Two minutes, and a couple of clicks, later it was installed and a new window opened with a brief guide to using the new Google toolbar. There is an option to get a more detailed explanation of how it works but I intend to do that over a period of time and the main part I was interested in I already knew about.

Basically what this download does is attach a small toolbar underneath the address box in Internet explorer with all the Google features on it. It is
only around half an inch deep and doesn’t really interfere with your browsing but does provide the search box on screen at all times. It is then just a case of typing your search in the box and clicking the search button on the toolbar. There is a pull down menu next to the box which displays all recent searches so you can easily go back to a previous result.
So far, so good.

As I’ve only just discovered this new addition to my browsing, I will certainly be giving it a good test over the next few days and will update this with my comments in the near future. At the moment I would say that as Google is becoming more and more the search engine choice of so many people, this download can only get more and more popular.

Summary: