Toolbar 2.0

New beta version of the toolbar

[GoogleGuy]

*cough*
[toolbar.google.com...]
*cough*

Not much new from a webmaster perspective, but the beta includes pop-up killing, auto form-filling, and some other fun things. :)

[It's a beta, so things may change between now and the final version. Let us know what you think at toolbar-beta at google.com though. ]

[dougb]

Hey, if this free popup blocker is widely adopted it will destroy the popup advertising market and spur advertisers to spend their dollars on more user-friendly ad units instead -- like, oh, say, AdWords :) (Something tells me I'm not the first to have this thought.)

[zeus]

About pop up killing, it could be cool if one could change the settings so it only block pop ups when there are more then 1 pop up,
so if the toolbar notice that on this site there will be like 2 pop ups loaded then it would block it.

The reason is most serious site have news in a single pop up or special offer if it is shopping site and dont want to miss that.

zeus

[RoadRash]

Loving the new tool bar, the pop up stopper is great. I would like to see a few more options, as listed in the previous post.

[Chndru]

This thingy is really cool. absolutely love this anti-pop stuff. (especially the cursor changes)..sheesh..why does google guys do things always good :)..maybe its time to add a link in their homepage <Get Google Toolbar> and remove <Make Google Your Homepage>

besides finally a way to get rid of the annoying way MSN search pop ups, when you spell a URL wrong!

___ added..

by the way i completely removed all the IE Standard, Address, links etc..just a googlebar...thanks to 'I am Feelin' Lucky' button..just type the keyword..no need to type www.my-news-site.com.. just my-news-site ...my browser looks clean and space efficient.

[edited by: Chndru at 6:17 pm (utc) on June 25, 2003]

[Clark]

Considering the fact that Microsoft is going after google big time, lord knows I see the msnbot a lot more than I see googlebot these days, I think Google should prepare itself for a serious battle. And a great first step that would also fulfills Sergey's "Do good" philosophy is to help the internet by helping promote other browsers. Set a good example with an Opera and Mozillabar. IE has been holding back the user experience by not developing a damn new thing. I too am only not using opera because of the google toolbar. Opera and Mozilla are light years ahead of ie but they need the support of a big player to make a dent with the regular folks.

[beebware]

Is it me or is www.google.co.uk missing from the list of countries? Instead of listing www.google.xxxx in the list can't you just get it changed to a menu similar to:
Google.com
----------
France
France (in Francais)
Germany
Germany (in Deustch)
United Kingdom

(with all the other countries/languages combinations) - that way it's a lot easier/quicker to find the country you are in...
=================
Add:
Oh on the "BlogThis" icon: Most of the blogging software supports an API (I forget what it's called now), so you just need a configuration screen for "URL/Username/Password" to make it "multi-platform".

[weblamer2]

11:00 AM PDT: Your blog is currently being converted to a new-and-improved version of Blogger.

hmp!

[weblamer2]

Uh, is there any way to clear out the auto-fill?

i do not want any coworkers who might use my machine realize i had been wasting time looking up the lyrics to the 'Thong Song'

[axa504]

Vote buttons? hmm I am wondering how will google use the results? What about hackers that can use this "feature", all other features looks cool to me. :o)

[bcolflesh]

Hitting the Blog button on our internal (behind a firewall/proxy) site hangs IE 6.0.2800.1106 - presumably it's waiting to connect to the Blogger site which will never happen - be nice if it would timeout.

Regards,
Brent

[juniperwasting]

I just had an odd occurance.

I was "tooling" around with the new bar, preformed a search for "web" and got a 403. Repeated, same thing, "forbidden".

I did send off a reply. The same search on the built in opera google search had no problems. Are there any troubles with the beta bar in communicating with the datacenters?

Will

[viggen]

It would be nice to have the option to select the various available country sites for the Google News.

[coolasafanman]

cool toy. don't forget to restart google compute after install - it shut mine off...

like the voting. my only concern is that more webmasters would be installing this than surfers and therefore the results would be skewed somewhat. how will google be marketing it to the public? I like how google has consistently kept a clean design but perhaps a little toolbar icon on the index wouldn't be a bad idea to get mainstream folks installing it and normalizing the results...

[Astinus]

beebware: the countries seems to be in alphabetical order of the suffix. I found "co.uk" alphabetized under UK, near the bottom of the list.

viggen: once you change the "Search using" country in Options, everything else changes too!

So if you change it to www.google.co.uk, then pressing the News button will now go to [news.google.co.uk...]

My favorites:
- you can resize the input box by dragging the little line on the right
- seen the dropdown on the "Search Web" button?

[ThatAdamGuy]

Chnrdu said:

...no need to type www.my-news-site.com.. just my-news-site ...my browser looks clean and space efficient.

Just an FYI: You can already do this in IE by typing sitename and hitting CTRL-ENTER, and it will automatically add the www and .com :)

[bcolflesh]

Just to be sure - these "voting" buttons are no different then the ones that were in the previous iterations of the toolbar - right?

Regards,
Brent

[Mozart]

I fully agree with Clark, support more browsers and platforms!

Mozilla Firebird is also my preferred browser due to its great support of CSS, integrated popup killer and especially the incredibly useful "open in new tab" instead of a new window. That way I can have 20 browser tabs open in just one single window, instead of 20 windows with IE.

So, please GG, give the mozilla developers the code for the pagerank to be displayed - or develop a full feature mozilla toolbar yourself! And of course you should support as many platforms and browsers as possible - should not be thaaat difficult hey?

And I second viggen's request to have direct links to the country Google news sites, despite Astinus' comments.

Can the silly voting buttons be removed? They don't do anything. Or do they?

Mozart

[GoogleGuy]

That's right, bcolflesh.

[Astinus]

And I second viggen's request to have direct links to the country Google news sites, despite Astinus' comments.

I'm curious, what exactly do you want?
- 2 buttons, "go to news" and "go to UK news"?
- the ability to set your search site and news site seperately in options, but the same amount of buttons as before
- something completely different

[viggen]

@Astinus

instead of just pressing the news button a drop down menu to choose from the available news countries

[canuck]

Ok, not that I surf porn sites, but everyone knows they are some of the worst pop-up offenders.

So, to see how good this pop-up buster works, I decided to surf a few for the *team*... works pretty nicely! With all the little beaps when a pop-up is blocked it felt like I was playing some nasty Quake game a few yrs ago!;)

Nice job...

I can see someone at work surfing a porn-site to test the toolbar and getting caught!;)

[canuck]

Also, I definitely agree it would handy to see what pop-ups are being blocked. Perhaps next to the "Blocked" button there could be a "Sin Bin" of sorts that if you click it you can see the last 5-10 pop-ups (the last one automatically shows when clicking the button).

This Sin Bin could be triggered on/off via options... just hate to have to click "Allow Site Popups"/refresh the page and then allow the popups out to roam. Via the Sin Bin the popups could be in a safe environment where they won't get out of control!

[Dayo_UK]

Ok - Had a go now I am at home (work wont allow toolbars - grr - how can I work under those circumstances)

Anyway, looks pretty neat - much better options section (well the layout/format is nicer) - still has the voting buttons :) :( - voted for my site just in case they do something now.

I think they are on to a winner with the blocking function.

Page Info option is no longer a default - I guess it would be only webmaster who check for cached pages and backward links - but I would have thought the translate option may be used by Joe Public. (I would have thought this would be more useful as a default than Blog Button)

Had the Alexa toolbar on for the first time the other day and I do like the way they have the similar sites in the toolbar.

Dayo

[SlyOldDog]

It's not only Google [searchenginewatch.com]
And more [searchenginewatch.com]

Hotbot, Infospace and Lycos all this week too!

[Clark]

Someone mentioned elsewhere that google should expand the toolbar into a browser. Now that's a great idea. Imagine if Opera and Google merged? That would wake up Microsoft.

[SlyOldDog]

I think they have more power with the tool bar. Check out the option "make Google my default search engine in Internet Explorer"

MSN suddenly lost their ace card ;)

[jesserud]

The pop-up blocker in the Google Toolbar seems to be timing-based. It blocks the window that the "linked images" bookmarklet creates *iff* the page contains more than a dozen or so links to images. If the page doesn't contain many links to images, then the bookmarklet runs slightly faster, and it allows the bookmarklet to create a window, which isn't very useful. I tried the bookmarklet on a bunch of porn galleries (10-30 links to large images, varying numbers of links to other things) and the Google Toolbar blocked the window every time.

The Google Toolbar also breaks the "search links" bookmarklet, which uses a prompt before opening the window.

I prefer Mozilla's event-based pop-up blocker. Clicks on links, buttons, and bookmarklets are allowed to open windows; onload and onunload events are not. Mozilla's pop-up blocker is more predictable.

[amznVibe]

does anyone have a direct download url yet for the beta?
this is just version 1.1.70
[toolbar.google.com...]

(and no, changing "current" to "beta" doesnt work :) )

[Mozart]

ahem... read the first msg and you'll find that mystery place where you can get it ;-)

[bwelford]

Another great feature of this Toolbar is the highlight button. You could probably do the same with the previous version, but I had not realized its functionality.

Checking some other pages that scored high in a particular SERP, I found that the highlight button showed some hidden text that contained the keywords. Without the highlight button, the white text on a white background did not show. I have also found printing out a web page with hidden text will also show the hidden text.

So for a quick check of your competitors' sites for given keywords, click on their pages with the highlight button activated. Words that disappear when the highlight button is clicked off were hidden text.

It also showed me that whatever filters Google may have introduced for hidden text are still not catching it. However that's another topic.

Barry Welford