Google Toolbar – Making Your Computing Experience Easier And More Enjoyable

photo credit: Davide Rizzo

Sometimes we overlook the simple pleasures of life and the simple features that are provided to us when we use our computers. There’s nothing more gratifying than watching someone use their computer and let out a burst of joy when they find or use something that makes their computing experience easier.

Take for instance the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Recently I was helping a medical researcher with his computer and he mentioned, “Man that Google search feature is incredible.” I asked him what he was talking about specifically and he went on to talk about how great it was to highlight a word while browsing, right-click and immediately do a Google search on that word. This feature is provided by the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. This feature is built-in to Firefox 2.0.

Listed below are some features of the Google Toolbar.

• Google Safe Browsing (Google Toolbar for Firefox) is a nice feature that used to be a separate add-on but is now built into Firefox 2.0+. Google Safe Browsing watches the sites you visit for phishing and spoofing attacks – web pages that might try and get your personal information like financial information from you by trickery.
• Add custom buttons or select from popular buttons available at the Google Button Gallery. This allows you to put buttons on your Google Toolbar for some of your most frequently visited and favorite sites.
• Another great feature and life saver if you’re a blogger or anyone filling out information on a web page is the Spell Check feature. The Spell Check feature provides an “AutoFix” feature. Let’s say you’ve finished a Google Document, you click on the Google Toolbar “Check” button to check your spelling in the document. You see a few words that are highlighted because of misspellings, you click the “AutoFix” menu choice on the “Check” button and now you’re misspelled words are automagically fixed. You can also click on each misspelled word and you are presented with a pop-up menu of word choices to replace the misspelled word.
• As mentioned above, the ability to highlight a word, right click on that word and search Google is very handy for a lot of folks. When you arrive at pages that contain the word you’re searching on you can use the Google Toolbar’s highlighter and all the occurrences of a word or phrase that you searched on will be highlighted. Pretty cool. See example below.
• There’s a pop-up blocker (Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer) on the toolbar as well. If a page is or isn’t working for you, just click on the pop-up blocker and that should allow the page to work the way you want it to.
• By the way, Firefox has a nice feature that recognizes a web page with an RSS feed and presents an RSS icon to the right of the address for that web page. If you’re unfamiliar with RSS, check this explanation out here.

I highlighted the word “Chronological” on a previous web page, right-clicked and selected Google Search which show me the following page. I turned on the yellow highlighter in the Google Toolbar and all the “Chronological” words on the page become highlighted making it extremely easy to see that word throughout the page.

You can download the Google Toolbar here. There are many more features and here is the link for all the information you need to know about the Google Toolbar for Firefox and here is the link for the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

If you’re an Internet Explorer user, you can download and install Toolbar 5 (BETA) for Internet Explorer here. There is a short video explaining some of the new features of Google Toolbar 5 (BETA) for Internet Explorer.

Have Fun!!