WSG Newsletter:
Toolbars and Deskbars

Issue: March 22, 2004

Not since the early days of the Internet browsers has there been so much competition in tools to help the searcher. Most of this invention is directed to people who use Windows and Internet Explorer. Microsoft, once it obtained market dominance with 95% share of the market, stopped enhancements, and others have rushed in to fill the gap. Google was among the first. It introduced its toolbar a couple of years ago and secured a loyal following by blocking pop-ups in the IE browser as well as offering easy search of Google engines. In 2002, Google was almost alone. Today, there are a gazillion.

Toolbars are browser add-ons. These are small applications written for Windows – usually 98 and above – and compatible only with the Internet Explorer browser, version 5.0 or 5.5 and above. The IE browser does have a search function but it’s not easy to customize or adjust. Search engines took advantage of this to offer their own wares that would do such useful things as block plug-ins, offer quick search of their engine, and highlight search results. Nearly every major search engine and some minor ones have developed toolbars that offer quick access to its search services along with some specialty search and special functions.

This has gone so far that Netscape itself has a toolbar to be used with Internet Explorer for instant access to Netscape search, news, e-mail, weather, map directions, and much more—and it will block pop-ups.

The deskbar has many tools too but is independent of the browser. Window began this when it offered a means to search from a box on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen display rather than through a browser. Google has claimed space there as well, as have a couple of others.

This newsletter reviews the plethora of toolbars now available and considers why or why not you would want one.

Toolbar Features

Typically a toolbar will:

1. Facilitate a quick search of the target search engine. Most toolbars are for a particular search engine but there are some that will handle a meta-search. Also a few will let you add favourite search tools.
2. Block pop-ups since Internet Explorer won’t.
3. Highlight search terms on a page of results.
4. Let you tab down a page for occurrence of a word or phrase.
5. Keep a search history so that you can review or rerun.

But each toolbar will have something more, and often unique, to offer. Choosing between them is the challenge, an active surfer will want to load two or three. These toolbars seem to coexist reasonably well and it’s easy to turn them off.and on through Internet Explorer.

Toolbars for One Engine

Alexa Toolbar (download.alexa.com)

Alexa is one of the older toolbars. Alexa searches Google but it is mainly known for the additional information it can provide about individual sites such as ownership, traffic, and “related sites”. Alexa made its name because it could see patterns in the traffic. It could see that people who read ResourceShelf by Gary Price also visit ResearchBuzz, or people who visit Websearchguide also use Web Search Tutorial, Noodle Tools and other tutorial sites. Likeness attracts likeness. Related sites and site information is a button click away for users of the Alexa toolbar.

AltaVista Toolbar (www.altavista.com/download)

Altavista does web search, multimedia and news – all of these are Altavista strong points. It especially excels at translation – it can translate a web page or text into 10 languages.

Ask Jeeves (sp.ask.com/docs/toolbar/)

Ask Jeeves exploits its answering capabilities in a toolbar that includes Ask Jeeves search, weather, dictionary, news, pictures, stocks, and products. It is highly customizable right down to the colour used in highlighting. U.S. residents can save their city or zip code to get more personalized results – likely something that will become more important over the next few months. The best feature is zooming into a page. With Zoom one can shrink or enlarge a page according to need and to paper size. Finally, we have a solution for the Web page that doesn’t fit on the standard 8 ½ by 11.

Google Toolbar (toolbar.google.com)

Google toolbar is among the most popular. It is into version 2.0. The toolbar offers search at any of the Google search engines – web, news, newsgroups, images, and Froogle for shopping – plus dictionary and stock quotes. Many will like the page information that includes Google’s cached version of the page. People who care about placement of results in search engines use the Page Rank to see where their site places. The toolbar helps Google bloggers add entries to their weblogs at Blogger.com. It also has an autofill function for filling in forms – do only once and click to reuse.

HotBot Desktop (www.hotbot.com/tools/desktop/)

The just released HotBot Desktop (March 2004) is the first to support searches of document files on the hard drive, browser history, and e-mail folders for Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. Web search is based on Inktomi and other favourite search tools can be added. People who like to receive RSS feeds might be pleased with the built-in newsreader, or at least the ability to do keyword searches on the feeds. The downside to the RSS reader and the Web searches are the text ads. HotBot also has a Deskbar, described below.

Teoma (sp.ask.com/docs/teoma/toolbar/)

Teoma has a very simple bar – just Teoma search, a dictionary, highlighting and emailing a page to friend. Since the Internet Explorer browser has an email capability, the last seems unnecessary.

Vivisimo (vivisimo.com/toolbar/toolbar-download.html)

Vivisimo has two toolbars – a full one that will search and block popups, and a minibar that just does the search. The value is in seeing results grouped into folders whether on a search of Vivisimo’s collection of search engines, its collection of news engines, PubMed, or a given site. Searching the current site is a feature available through many toolbars. Vivisimo’s has extra zest because of the clustering it can do. Unfortunately, you can’t do a search at Google and then ask Vivisimo to consider it a site search – won’t work.

MSN and Yahoo - The Portals

MSN and Yahoo have added portal capabilities to their toolbars.

Microsoft launched the MSN toolbar (toolbar.msn.com/) with a popup blocker in late 2003, much to the amusement of people who noted that MSN was receiving advertising money to generate popups. That aside, the toolbar also has quick connects to Messenger and Hotmail (as if you didn’t already have enough links sitting in the taskbar tray).

Yahoo Companion (companion.yahoo.com/) offers access to the many Yahoo information centers – news, finance, maps, images, as well as myYahoo personal tools for calendar, email and home page. Its distinctive feature is a web-based bookmark manager – access bookmarks from any computer.

Toolbars for multiple engines

The browser can get top-heavy with toolbars. An alternative is to get one that searches several search engines at one time, or at least offers a choice.

Dogpile (www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/tbar/)

PC Magazine picked Dogpile’s toolbar as being among the best. It’s probably liked most by Dogpile meta-search fans. But it does offer more including white and yellow pages (mainly of use to people in the United States), weather, horoscopes, and maps. In March 2004 it added a RSS viewer for subscribing to feeds in either RSS or Atom formats. An added enticement is the Cursor Search – point the mouse to a word and right-click to initiate a search. If you can stand news tickers, there is one of those too - and a SearchSpy for indulging in search voyeurism.

Metacrawler and Webcrawler have similar toolbars.

Groowe (www.groowe.com)

Groowe saw the opportunity to consolidate the toolbars into one line in the browser. Many love it including Danny Sullivan and Mary Ellen Bates. The Groowe Toolbar has bars for 17 search engines and some additional specialty sites for shopping, downloads, and jobs. Some customization is possible such as rearranging the order of the engines and removing ones you don’t want (except for Overture, the paid placement engine owned by Yahoo). Each search engine has a bar containing the search box and several of the unique features of the engine. Google’s bar has the Advanced Search. Ask Jeeves has Ask Kids. The approach is innovative and easy to use.

Copernic Meta Search
(www.copernic.com/en/products/meta/index.html)

Copernic Technologies in Quebec has made search its business. Already known for the Copernic Agent software, Copernic added to its line the free Copernic Meta – a toolbar that will meta-search Copernic’s collection of search engines. There are collections for the Web (includes Google), images, audio, multimedia, and news (not strong). In addition, one can add individual search engines either from Copernic’s page of search engines or ones we find on our own. This creates a all-purpose search box in our browser. Copernic Meta has the usual features for highlighting search terms, finding individual terms, and blocking popups.

Deskbars

The deskbars tend to offer multiple tool search too. These may become part of the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen or be placed on the desktop, likely at the bottom.

Microsoft began the deskbar search in Windows 98 by making it possible to put the IE search box and the links bar right on the taskbar. Do this by right-clicking on the taskbar and reviewing the choices for Toolbars. Now you can search from any application without opening the browser first.

Google liked that idea and developed its own Deskbar (toolbar.google.com/deskbar/) . This Deskbar, in addition to the usual Google search sites, definitions, thesaurus, stock quotes – all easily activated through keyboard controls. No browser need be open. Google can show results in a mini-viewer. But Google really distinguishes itself with the customized search option by which users can add favourite search engines.

HotBot (www.hotbot.com/tools/deskbar/) built on Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar – a pioneer in providing shortcuts for searching. HotBot will do more than search Inktomi, Lycos, and Google. It can handle calculations, send email, check the weather or maps. But, doing any of these entails learning to use special commands and format. This tool is not as easy as the others.

From Europe comes A-Toolbar (www.metaeureka.com/download.shtml), the swiss-army knife of all deskbars. This one is associated with the Meta-Eureka meta-search engine. Search is the first priority, either through Meta-Eureka’s collections of search engines, or list of individual search engines to which it is easy to add more of your own. It has a stunning array of 45 tools to cover general use, url investigation, and network analysis. URL tools and Network are very specialized, but many people can make good use of the General Tools for day to day living with a computer – reading news feeds, keeping passwords, currency converter, popup killer stock quotations, weather forecast, dictionary, language translation, agenda, reminders, horoscope, games – and several more. A-Toolbar can save one time and money.

Some Criticisms

Not everyone is enamoured with toolbars. They might be seen as encouraging lazy searching – a convenience that saps people of thinking power. There are no aids to help the searcher construct the query, and toolbars that use meta-searchers won’t support any syntax. Meta-searchers are also prone to displaying paid-placement ads into the search results without labelling them as such. Some toolbars have been viewed as spyware because the keep track of searches (usually logged in cookies). Alexa, especially, because it tracks the sites people visit, is a pariah in some circles. Google, at least, offers the option to turn off feedback to the Google monitors.

Conclusion

These are not sophisticated tools. For Web searching they are best used for quick lookups and first cuts. Those that have some extra reference capabilities such as dictionary or thesaurus will be handy. Being able to see highlighted terms on a page is a great boon as is being able to click through a page to find where a word occurred. In fact, you can use Google or Copernic Meta just for finding a word on a page – independent of a web search.

My experience with these toolbars is that they save time, and may offer the something extra that makes work easier – such as Zoom at Ask Jeeves for printing a page, the document search from the HotBot Desktop, or the several calculators and convertors.

Newsletter by Gwen Harris who now has so many toolbars she can't read the web page.