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As consumers spend a greater amount of time on the Internet, any application such as the Goolge Toolbar which saves time optimizing user search is valuable. Web toolbars provide an embedded plug-in via the web browser menu structure to give ready access to Web search and other functions. There are two types of web toolbars found on the Internet today: those focused on search optimization, and niche toolbars specializing in a single function such as Ebay, Mapquest, and Dictionary.com.
The Google Toolbar focuses on enhancing the search experience of the user through optimization that takes the user to niche researches, based on user input and choices. - The Google Toolbar was first released in the early 2000s and updates to the application have been provided no less than annually since. The Toolbar is available for installation for the Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox Web browsers. It can also be embedded within the Google Chrome web browser. The Google toolbar is installed on the end-user's computer as a web browser plug-in vice as a stand alone application on the client computer. This permits the toolbar to natively interact with the web browser and user information to provide a better quality of service. Many of the earlier options available on the Google Toolbar have been embedded in today's Internet browsers, such as pop-up blocking, the ability to save form entry data and using page ranks to tailor search results. In the current version of the Google toolbar, the popular options to tailor are Google News and Tailored Google Search.
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Screenshot of the Advanced Google Toolbar OptionsThe configuration of the Google toolbar is designed to be tailored across end users. The new toolbar caches the configuration for each user so that it will load when logging into different computers. Google is one of the first companies to cache the configuration data for the user toolbar configuration on their servers, enabling the use at multiple locations for one user. The enhanced search option on the Google toolbar aides end user search queries by providing a list of suggestions that pop up below the search box along with the frequency of searches by other users. The toolbar also embeds the ability to share webpages via email and SMS text message.
A new feature in the current release of the toolbar is the WordTranslator feature. The WordTranslator feature of the Google toolbar enables the user to translate English words on a web page to and from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese, and Korean. There are a number of other advanced plug-in options available for the user to add to the Google toolbar options to include the Google pop-up blocker, search settings notifier, and web browser bookmarks that will travel with the user.
