Don't miss out on the many powers of the Google Toolbar (some hidden buttons, some new context menu options, and more)
If you're a user of the Google toolbar, are you getting the most out of it? If you don't know what it is, let me also tell you why you should definitely add it, to either IE or Firefox. It adds some really awesome features that I use literally all day every day. There are also hidden gems that regular users could easily miss. I'll discuss some of these in a moment. First, what is it, how do you get it, and why would you want to? I'll sprinkle a few tips along the way.
Getting the toolbar
First, what is the toolbar? It's a free add-in that can be added to either Internet Explorer or Firefox, in just moments. More on what it does in a moment.
Where do you get it? http://toolbar.google.com
How would you ever know about it if you'd missed out? Well, if you've only ever used the front page of Google and never clicked any of the links, you could have learned about it by clicking the "more" link to the right above the search text box. There are all kinds of nifty corners in the google world.
Why get the toolbar?
Why should you bother? Well, for most the main benefit is that it adds a new toolbar to your browser, such that you can easily do Google searches without having to visit that Google front page. As soon as you see something, you just type it in the toolbar text area and voila, there's your answer. But there's a lot more to the toolbar than just making it easier to do searches. Some are widely known, while others are right there in front of you and you may never even notice them. There's one I missed myself until today. Let me focus first on some of the key benefits.
Pop Up Blocker
Many know this, as it's an option that's made clear during the installer. One of the great features that the toolbar adds (which you never need to do anything to benefit from) is the popup blocker. Sure, new versions of browsers also do the job for you, but there's no harm in having 2 guards at the door to keep out the intruders! :-) You can see in the screenshot above that it had blocked 12 popups when this screenshot was taken (it's an image offered as an example on the Google web site). It will click if it blocks one and show a slightly different icon. You can click it if you ever want to let a pop up through.
Google News
Another compelling feature is the news button. It's the first icon to the right of the text box in the icon above but may be elsewhere (or not even shown) on your toolbar if you have it installed. More in a moment on showing new buttons that might be hidden from you for now .It's a little newspaper icon, which when clicked simply takes you to the google news page (http://news.google.com/). It's a great way to keep up on the day's news.
For each story, it offers links to other outlets for the topic, sometimes showing a link that could take you to several dozen other different takes on a story. (But each article and the link to those other ones is very brief, so you see lots of news on the page.) Indeed, not further that the page is broken into categories such as world, US, business, sci/tech (my favorite), sports, entertainment, and health. You can even modify that page to rearrange the order of the categories shown, how many articles in each type, and so on.
What's great is that it loads very quickly. Some may choose to set it as their default home page. I don't (preferring to have a blank home page to make a new browser window open as fast as possible), but I do actually use this news button almost daily. Whenever I want to check if I have a good internet connection, that's the button I click. Nice little tester, and I may see some news I might otherwise have missed. :-)
Right-click context menu additions
Someone else doing a review of the features of the toolbar might at this point go on to talk about the other nifty buttons, and there are many which I will cover in a moment, but I want to stop and talk about something that many may easily miss: the new set of options that the toolbar enables when you right-click on a web page. This "context menu" (when clicked on something other than an image or text area) will show options like "back", forward", "print" "view source" and so on.
But when you add the toolbar, now you will see other very interesting new options that may be MUCH more valuable than you first imagine.
Cached Snapshot
For instance, the cached snapshot feature is just awesome. It will show you the page as Google had last grabbed it to index its content. This can be useful, such as in situations where you visit a page and it's gone (temporarily, or permanently), or if something's been changed but you're pretty sure you'd seen it differently before. Of course, if the cached page has since been updated and no longer reflects either the missing page or the missing content, then it's done all it can do for you. (Of course, there's always the "internet wayback machine" at archive.org, which I've talked about before!).
Extra tip: Just be careful with both techniques that when you try to use them on 404 or other "page not found" kind of page, you may have been redirected to an error page by the web site developer or by the web server, so that the page you're now on when seeing the error is not the one you originally requested. Here's a trick, if you had clicked a link to see the page. Back up to the previous page and instead right-click on the link and choose "cached snapshot of page" on that. Then you will be sure to be asking Google to show you the cache for that specific URL.
I'll note that this feature, like many of them, is also available if you just go to the google site and click "advanced search". It's just that the toolbar simply makes it much easier and readily accessible.
Backward Links
Another nifty context-menu addition is the backward links option. With this, you can find out what pages link to the page that you're looking at. This can be so valuable, such as when you are on a page and just know that there must be other discussion about it (others who've written about it on other sites, or simply other pages on the site you're on). Some also use it for ego-stroking , to see who else is linking to them.
SpellCheck
Also cool is the spellcheck.button. That's the one I'd missed until today (thanks, Scott Stroz for reminding me of it!). With it, you can spell check any page as you're typing text into it, which can be very helpful when filling out a site feedback form, a blog comment area, or even for bloggers themselves when creating their blog entries (I hope to remember to use it before I post this one!) Once started, it changes the look of the page so all data entry areas become all blue and read-only while it highlights in red any typos it finds. Note that you can then left- or right-click on each highlighted word and it will offer alternatives you can pick, or you can choose "ignore all" so it's not flagged any more in this session, or you can "add to dictionary" so it's not flagged ever again for you. My only two niggles are that there is no "change all" if you've misspelled a word many times, nor is there (that I can see) any means to skip easily to the next misspelled word. In a large page or blog entry (like this), it means I have to scroll down and keep my eye out for the red highlights. Still, a very cool tool and one I can't believe I've missed for so long.
Other Toolbar Buttons
Some of the other toolbar buttons you should look into are Autofill which if you choose to use it will let you easily fill in form fields with common things like name, email, phone, address. You're in total control of whether it's ever used, and whether you want to keep or change any of the form fields that it fills in. Also useful is Autolink, which is great if you're on a site with an address and would want to go get a map. Just click the button, and the toolbar will try to find any addresses on the page and turn them into links to take you right to the map page (google maps) to quickly show you the map.
"Hidden" Toolbar Buttons
There are also some very useful other buttons that you might not even notice are there, because...well... they're not enabled by default. You need to click the Options button on the toolbar (in version 3, or Settings>Options in v4) on the right side of the toolbar to add them. In v3, you then click the "more" tab to choose from among new available options. There really are some great ones that are worth adding.
Search Site
One of the first that I always add on a new machine is search site. This is just awesome. What it does is limit the search to only the current site that you're on. You may not think about it, but google has usually searched the entire site of content (at least what it could readily access) and has indexed many more pages than just the one you may be looking at. This is especially useful if a site has no "search" mechanism of its own (or if it's broken or feeble).
When you want to search a site, visit it, then type in a word/phrase in the toolbar text area, and rather than just hit enter, click the new site button that will have been added to the toolbar. Move your mouse over them to find it (again, if you added it using the "more buttons" feature discussed above. Google will search just that site. Again, this is something you can do from the advanced search at google.com. This is just so much easier, especially when you're already visiting a given site.
Search Images and Search Froogle
Similar to the search site feature, if you add the search images and search froogle, you'll make more readily available Google's ability to search for all images that have some given keywords associated with them. I've used this to find pictures of people I might be engaging in conversation with, or to find an image of a product or service that I might to reference in a blog post, etc. And if you don't know about froogle (www.froogle.com), it's a great repository of best prices on thousands (millions?) of items. Before you buy something, online or in the store, search for it at froogle first. This toolbar option just makes it easier.
Moving "Up" in a website you're visiting
Not everything the toolbar adds is about searching. Some are just useful utilities that you could leverage while traversing a web site. How often have you been looking at a given page and thought, "no, that's not it. I need to go to another page" and you start editing the URL, perhaps to remove the current filename you're looking at to see what other pages might be in the current directory (assuming the web server is set up to expose that information). That's what the up button does. It just removes portions of the current URL and submits the page, first removing the filename, then on subsequent clicks removing any directory references, up to the root of the web site. It can be very handy, if you remember to use it (and remember to add it, as discussed above).
There are some other features in there that I just honestly never have gotten into, such as page rank, next/prev (for moving through words meeting the searched terms on the page displayed), search groups (for searching newsgroups), word and page translator (for converting words or an entire page to another language), blog this (for blogger, and which in the v4 toolbar is now under "send this"), and more. More on the version 4 toolbar in a moment.)
Adding new toolbar buttons
You can also even add more buttons to the toolbar, including things for news, shopping, entertainment and more: http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/gallery. Buttons can navigate to and search a site, display an RSS feed in a menu, and more.
In fact, in version 4 and above, you can even add your own new buttons by just just right-clicking on a page and choosing "generate custom search". See this doc for more. There's even a complete API for doing more elaborate things and creating them using XML.
The new version 4 toolbar
That last point about version 4 is worth noting. I've had the Google toolbar for sometime, but did not know about that new feature. When I read it, and right-clicked, I saw no "generate custom search". So what version am I running? Well, in my current version I could click on a little down arrow to the right of the word Google on the left of the toolbar (not shown in the new version 4 interface above), and see that I'm on version 3. So I would need to update to that release to get the new custom buttons feature.
Indeed, you can find out more about what's in that toolbar version and all versions (IE and FF, new and old) at http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/static.py?page=features.html&hl=en&v=4
It's curious that it says there that the toolbar auto-updates itself. What they're not saying is that this is only for releases within a given version. If you are on the v3 toolbar, you are not auto-updated to the v4 toolbar. That's just as well. I'm not a real fan of the new v4 search box. Yes, it adds some suggest and history features, but I like how in v3 the search box holds the history of past searches as a drop-down list. I had it on briefly and had to reinstall my laptop and inadvertently reinstalled the v3 toolbar. For now, I'm happy with that. Still, for the new custom toolbar/search feature above, I may have to give v4 another go.
Hope some of this was interesting to readers.