Google Hacks 2Nd Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 60. Add Google to Your Toolbar or Desktop

Google from wherever you are without skipping a
beat, thanks to an assortment of browser search boxes, toolbars, and
desktop applications .

Just because
Google is a
web site doesn't mean that you have to deal with it
as such. Picture this: you're in the zone, working
on that big project, browser windows, spreadsheets, and slides
littering your desktopboth figuratively and literally. At some
point you need to check a fact, find a statistic, or read a news
story. Now, you could open yet another browser window, type
google.com, and search the Web, but
that's about two steps too many and (done
repeatedly) may well disrupt your flow.

Take, for instance, what happened in the midst of writing this hack.
Up popped an instant message from a friend with a patent number that
he'd stumbled across and that he thought I might
find interesting. I could have opened another browser window, browsed
to http://www.google.com, Googled
for "us patent database", and searched for that
particular patent. Instead, I pasted that number into the Google
Search box built right into my Firefox web browser (shown in Figure 5-3), prefixed it with patent,
hit Return, and clicked the quick link to the patent at the U.S.
Patent Database ["Quick Links: Google by
Numbers" in Chapter 1]. This
sort of flow, despite saving only a step or two at most, is so catchy
that it has become an integral part of my workflow.

By toolbar , we actually mean one of several add-ons: search boxes built into your web browser (as described earlier), toolbars that attach themselves to your browser and provide search and other capabilities, and search boxes you that you can embed elsewhere into your desktop, taskbar, or toolbars.

This hack is a roundup of some of the Google toolbars that
you'll find available from Google itself or from
third-party developers (all of them are free for the taking.)

5.3.1. Browser Search Boxes

The open source Mozilla
(http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x),

Firefox
(http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox), and
Netscape
(http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers)
browsers, as well as the Mac
OS X Safari (http://www.apple.com/safari) and Opera
Software's

Opera
(http://www.opera.com) browsers,
all sport a search box either in the toolbar itself or a sidebar like
the one shown in Figure 5-4. Most often, too, the
search box can be configured to redirect your searches to any number
of search engines using a drop-down menu or preference setting.

The Mozilla search functionality shown in Figure 5-4 can be reached by various means: typing a
search into the address bar and clicking the Search button, selecting
ViewSidebar and choosing the Search tab, or highlighting a
word in any web page, right-clicking it, and selecting
"Search Web for ..."

5.3.2. The Official Google Toolbar

The official Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com; Windows only) goes
so much further than a simple search box for Google and so is highly
recommended for Windows users. It is constantly updated, sometimes
with Google slipping in little Easter eggs (read: surprise features)
just for fun. Figure 5-5 shows the Google Toolbar
in action.

Search the Web, the site you're currently visiting,
by country domain, or use any of the various Google properties,
including Google Images, Directory, News, Froogle, and so forth.
There are even voting buttons (the happy- and sad-face icons) if you
feel like letting Google know what you think of the page
you're on. And the official toolbar is the only
version that sports PageRank ["The Mysterious
PageRank" in Chapter 8] for
the page you're currently visiting. Additional
features include pop-up blocking, auto-fill for web forms,
highlighting of search keywords in resulting pages, and more.

5.3.3. The Mozilla Googlebar

Mozilla/Firefox users (whether on Windows, Mac, or Unix/Linux)
can't use the Google Toolbar, but the
Googlebar
(http://googlebar.mozdev.org) is
a rather acceptable substitute. It looks and acts very much like the
official version, attempting to match any functionality that it can
(see Figure 5-6). It doesn't,
however, provide PageRank.

Most people don't care one whit about
PageRank. But webmasters and
researchers consider PageRank a critical indicator of the importance
of a particular web site or individual page. If
you're a Mozilla/Firefox user and just
can't live without PageRank,

PRGooglebar
(http://www.prgooglebar.org) is a
modification of the Googlebar that incorporates PageRank. And then
there's also the

Google PageRank extension (http://www.tapouillo.com/firefox_extension),
embedding PageRank into the Mozilla/Firefox status bar.

5.3.4. Desktop Search Boxes

And then there are applications that live not in the browser, but on
your desktop, in your taskbar or toolbar, or behind a
right-mouse-click.

Gophoria (http://www.gophoria.com; Windows only) turns
any text, URL, or image into a right-clickable search. Highlight some
text, right click, and select "gophoria
search" from the context menu.

The official

Google Deskbar (http://toolbar.google.com/deskbar; Windows
only) affords you a quick and simple interface to Google Web Search,
Google Images, Google News, and Froogle. Results show up in a small
preview window that looks like the familiar Google results page.

Dave's Quick Search
Deskbar (http://dqsd.net; Windows
only), as you may have guessed from the name, sits in your deskbar or
taskbar. But the simple name belies some incredible functionality,
not the least of which is special triggers and switches. Enter a
query in the box and hit the Enter key on your keyboard to search
Google; results pop up in your browser. Feeling lucky? Add an
exclamation mark (!) to your query (e.g.,
"washington post"!) and you'll be
taken straight to the top ranked result. The #
tacked on to George Bush (tx)#
performs a phonebook lookup. & dives into the
Google cache. And there are tons more; press F1 for a full list,
shown in Figure 5-7.

GGSearch (http://www.frysianfools.com/ggsearch; Windows
only) is one of the more gorgeous toolbars I've
seen, with several themes and skins. There are many search tools
here, accessible via a series of menus. It's rather
mind-bending to see Google's simple interface sliced
and diced into menu item within menu item (Figure 5-8), but it's a flexible, useful
tool, nevertheless.

Mac OS X's built-in Search with Google service (Mac
only ;-) ) puts Google only a three-finger key combo away. Highlight
any text in any OS X Service-aware application (e.g., not a Microsoft
Office for Mac OS X product) and select ServicesSearch with
Google from the application menu (i.e., Finder if you
you're in the Finder, Safari if
you're in Safari) or type Command-Shift-L and
you'll Google for the highlighted words. The results
appear in your browser window.