Search Engine Toolbar Round-up: One-Click Web Searching and Much More MSN Toolbar and Yahoo! Toolbar Wayne Kawamoto
MSN Toolbar
For now, MSN's Toolbar trails the offerings from Google and Yahoo!, but it's still a competent toolbar that offers extensive search capabilities as well as a pop-up ad blocker.
The MSN Toolbar setup program is a little over 600K, and the toolbar easily installs into Internet Explorer. Good customization tools let you add or delete buttons and resize the search text box as you wish. The toolbar lets you easily search the Web, a current site, White and Yellow pages, stocks, movies, and products. Plus there's a handy dictionary.
The program's first rate highlighter shows you where search terms reside on Web pages and helps you navigate around the page. The toolbar also offers
shortcut buttons to take you to various MSN services that include Hotmail, MSN Messenger, and more. The competent pop-up ad blocker does its job but won't display blocked ads the way that the Google and Yahoo! toolbars do.
If you prefer MSN, you'll find that the toolbar is a worthy addition to Internet Explorer.
Yahoo! Toolbar
Definite competition for Google's toolbar, the Yahoo! Toolbar for Internet Explorer and the new Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox offer solid search capabilities, a pop-up ad blocker, an anti-spyware scanner (in the IE release), and lots of customization options.
At 3MB (with the spyware option — under 400KB without it) the Yahoo! Toolbar is a larger download than the others, but it quickly and easily installs itself. The toolbar offers a wealth of customization features to reorder buttons and view icons or text, and recent versions make it possible to alter the size of the search text box.
Using the Yahoo! Toolbar, you can search the entire Web or limit searches to specific sites that you visit, as well as search specifically through Yellow Pages or for news, stock quotes, products, maps, movie showtimes (based on zipcode), and more. As with the other toolbars, you simply select your option from a convenient drop-down menu.
The toolbar also offers single-button access to Yahoo! e-mail with options to compose e-mail and more. A highlighter indicates where search results appear on a page. Like the Google toolbar, the Yahoo! Toolbar features a competent pop-up ad blocker that lets you look at ads that it has already blocked and also allows you to create a whitelist of ads to display.
The Anti-Spy feature clearly sets the Yahoo! Toolbar apart from and ahead of the others. This feature scans your computer for questionable applications and reports a list of suspicious files. And another plus, there's a handy bookmark feature that maintains the bookmarks that you store in Internet Explorer.
On the downside, Yahoo! Toolbar does lack the handy automatic form fill-in features found in Google Toolbar and MSN Toolbar.
Despite this lone shortcoming, Yahoo's Toolbar is, for now at least, the strongest of the three major toolbar offerings and the only one to currently offer a version for Mozilla Firefox. If you already rely on Yahoo or if you're using Mozilla Firefox, it is clearly the toolbar of choice.
Bottom Line
Among the three major toolbars now available, the Google and Yahoo! toolbars reign supreme with Yahoo! Toolbar holding a slight edge. But despite the differences between the search toolbars, in the end, you'll probably end up choosing and using the one that's associated with your favorite search site. And you may find the extras like the pop-up ad blockers and anti-spyware features to be icing on the cake.
Overall, if you're using Internet Explorer 5+ or an IE-based browser like Maxthon or Avant Browser and have been considering a search toolbar, now is a great time to add one. We can only hope the same choices apply to alternative browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Opera in the near future.
Pros: Quick access to Google, Froogle, and similar Google-related search sites; solid ad pop-up blocking capabilities, extensive customization options
Cons: Requires IE 5.5+ (no versions available for Mozilla Firefox or other browsers), AutoFill form fill tool only works for a single user (as opposed to MSN's toolbar, which supports information for multiple users)
