Just a quick heads-up to those who haven't seen it yet, there's a new beta version of the Google Toolbar available. As a rule, I hate browser toolbars and sidebars and what-not that take up valuable browser real-estate, but in Google's typical style, they pack a ton of features into a very small (and configurable) little area of your toolbar.

With the beta, they've stiffened up the popup blocker that was in previous betas, it now works on many more (but not all) popups. It also gives you a little button to allow all popups from a given site (for sites that use popups for legitimate purposes.) I realize there are popup blockers out there that have this kind of feature, but having it integrated into the search toolbar is a great idea.

They also added a thing to automatically fill out forms for you, but I haven't tried that yet.

Then there's the usual search features from the previous versions... Highlight search terms on the page, etc. Basically, if you use Google as your primary search engine, you need this.

The highlight feature of that toolbar is remarkably useful. I wish I had some version of it under Unix.

I really wish that the toolbar could be added to the end of one of the other toolbars in IE. I hate adding more space. Although I'm sure this is mostly or all an IE thing.

It *can* be added to the end of one of the other toolbars. Uncheck "Lock the Toolbars" and move it wherever you want it. You can also add/remove buttons, turn off the text labels, etc.

Here's what mine looks like:



The little triangle next to the search button lets me choose which Google site (web, groups, news, etc.) I wanna search, saving real estate. Very handy.

There is JS code here that adds highlighting. You could write a script that parsed a URL and inserted the appropriate calls into the HTML to do it.

Wonderful!! I'll try it!!

I might be missing your point, or not understanding exactly how one might implement this, but the point is that the Google's toolbar highlighting is wildly convenient because it automatically creates buttons for each search term and doesn't require any sort of filtering (beyond what happens automatically with the toolbar).

Beyond the hassle of figuring out how to filter HTML automatically, you still have the difficulty of trying to figure out how to implement a UI that would be more convenient than simply hitting Ctrl-F and retyping part of your search. I can see how it might be implemented in the Mozilla sidebar, but I haven't seen anyone do it yet, and I'm not so inclined to do it myself.

What exactly are the "advanced features" that you miss out on if you want the privacy?

It's just PageRank and Category, I think.

You know what? I didn't mean the highlighting. I meant the automatic search buttons -- the Word Find, as they call it. I was conflating the two features. Sorry.

Yeah, just Page Rank and Category.

The highlighting is also useful, unless the page happens to use similar (or distracting) background colors which interfere with the highlight. I find myself not using word find buttons so much, and instead scrolling through the docs and visually picking up where the search terms are.

Damn I wish I worked for Google.

So far I really like the toolbar. Thanks for posting it! The only thing I don't like is the search button. I wish I could remove it or only remove the text for that button. I know you can remove text, but for some reason I like seeing how many windows the popup blocker has blocked.

And I LOVE the popup blocker. I've never used one of these programs, and it's just wonderful. (now I can search for roms without getting thousands of ads that have little to do with video games )

For those running Mozilla Firebird, a similar Google toolbar is here.