Entered CNET Catalog: 11/09/2004
SKU: SERVGOOGLE
Manufacturer: Google
Product summary
The good: Easy installation; good customization options; offers many specific types of searches; auto form filler with password protection; posts entries on your blog; translates Web pages into English; gets info on the Web page you're visiting; best overall search results.
The bad: No specific weather search; voting buttons don't serve any apparent function; spotty up-one-level feature.
The bottom line: Google's toolbar goes above and beyond its competitors, offering a wide range of specific searches, stellar search results, and a slew of extras, including an automatic form filler.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 11/22/2004
Installing Google's 463KB toolbar was a piece of cake in our tests; it took us about a minute to download the install file and step through the setup wizard. Once the toolbar is up and running, you can add or remove buttons, set the buttons as icon only or icon and text, and drag the search box bigger or smaller.
Google toolbar gives you the requisite specific search options, including searching the entire Web, querying Google Images, News, Groups (for Usenet posts), and Froogle (Google's shopping search). You can also search for stock quotes--Google sends you to Yahoo Finance for that--and dictionary entries through Dictionary.com, but there's no weather search--sorry, Weather Channel fans. You can also highlight search terms on the page you're visiting and cycle through search results from the toolbar.
Google's toolbar has an excellent set of advanced features, including a decent pop-up blocker, which lets you allow pop-ups from a given domain but won't let you see a recently blocked pop-up, although you can try clicking the link again while pressing the Ctrl key. We like the Google Toolbar's autofill feature, complete with password-protected entries for credit cards, as well as the toolbar's ability to add links and posts to your Blogger site--not surprising, given that Google owns Blogger. The up-one-level button is a cool idea, but it's spotty in execution (it just strips directories off the URL you're visiting, which works for some sites but gives you 404 errors on others), while the voting buttons that let you sound off about a given Web site don't really do much of anything for now, though Google says that voting statistics will be put to use eventually. More interesting are the Page Info tools, which will give you a cached snapshot of a page, list similar pages, show you all the backward links to a page, or translate a page into English. One feature we'd like to see in future versions of Google Toolbar is the ability to store Web bookmarks to make them accessible from any browser, à la Yahoo and A9.
Google scored at the top of the class for most relevant search results, beating out A9, HotBot, AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves, although it lagged behind Yahoo and AltaVista in terms of its sheer number of hits. Should you ever want to know about the economics of Andorra, a small European parliamentary democracy, Google returned the most hits of any search site.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9out of 9 user reviews
Expedient access to everything needed.
Pros: Quick and adds greatly to productivity on the web.
Cons: The only downside is that it adds another bar to the top of the browser, but even this can be eliminated with replacement of search boxes and rearrangement of icons.
out of 9 user reviews
A useful edition to any browser
Pros: convenient and adds a lot of subtle features to your surfing experience
Cons: inconsistent across browers, certain features need work
The Firefox version works great considering you can customize your layout so you don't end up with two search windows plus the integration of independent extensions like Google Safe Browsing are welcome additions.
The IE edition boasts a lot of promising features like the Bookmarks tool and the ability to customize the toolbar buttons.
Both browsers a weakened by the fact that one has features the other doesn't. Plus for the IE version, one cannot remain logged in for long periods of time since it constantly times out, thus requiring you to log in to each Google service manually.
Overall, they're very useful additions to any computer. Let's just hope Google works out the kinks in the coming months.
out of 9 user reviews
Does not compare to Yahoo Toolbar
Pros: well... google search is the best search
Cons: so-so popup blocking, no other real functionality
out of 9 user reviews
Great in some ways
Pros: Searching capabilities, and other features
Cons: Popup blocking
out of 9 user reviews
The review is wrong
Pros: Weather search is there
Cons: nothing wrong with it
out of 9 user reviews
Perfect........When I use Internet Explorer
Pros: Ease of use. Search results.
Cons: none that i can think of.
out of 9 user reviews
Never lets me down
Pros: Fast and Easy
Cons: None really
out of 9 user reviews
nothing better
Pros: fast, accurate, highlighting, keyword search, pop-up blocking, autofill forms
Cons: takes up 1cm off your browser window...
out of 9 user reviews
Excellent product
Pros: Works well. Many, many hits.
Cons: Sometimes goes far astray.
