Google Toolbar was a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

toolbar for

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

, developed by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. It was first released in 2000 for Internet Explorer 5 and above. Google Toolbar was also distributed as a Mozilla plug-in for

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

from September 2005 to June 2011. On December 12, 2021, the software was no longer available for download, and the main website now redirects to a support page, though a page still exists with the original page design.

Features

Google Toolbar resided above the browser's tab bar and provided a search box to carry out web searches. Users could log into their

Gmail Gmail is the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...

accounts and access their email, saved bookmarks, and web history. It had tools such as AutoLink, AutoFill,

Translation Translation is the communication of the semantics, meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The English la ...

, and spell checker on all browsers. The pop-up blocker and word finder were restricted to

. Google Toolbar was often distributed through product bundling with a primary download.

Sidewiki

Google Sidewiki was launched on September 23, 2009, allowing users to make comments, which were visible to the public, on any web page.

used ranking algorithms to determine comment relevancy and usefulness using criteria such as users voting up and down a comment and past contributions. Sidewiki was available for

and

through Google Toolbar, the

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...

browser through an add-on, and for other browsers, like

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

, it was available as a bookmarklet. Web site owners could not control Sidewiki comments, and there was no way for a web site to opt out of Sidewiki; however, Sidewiki was disabled on secure sites. In September 2011, Google announced that it would discontinue Sidewiki.

My Location

My Location was a

geolocation Geopositioning is the process of determining or estimating the geographic position of an object or a person. Geopositioning yields a set of Geographic coordinate system, geographic coordinates (such as latitude and longitude) in a given map datum ...

service which uses the location of

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for Wireless LAN, local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by ...

access points to determine the toolbar user's location. This location was used to optimize search results based on where the user was located. Google Toolbar could also provide the geolocation data to third-party websites through the W3C Geolocation API.

AutoLink

Google Toolbar was criticized when the AutoLink feature was added to the toolbar because this new feature directed users to pre-selected commercial websites. For example, if it found a book's

ISBN The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase or receive ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency. A different ISBN is assigned to e ...

on a webpage, it provided a link to Amazon's product page for the particular book. Google said that the feature "adds useful links" and "none of the companies which received AutoLinks had paid for the service."

Web caching

The desktop version of Google Toolbar showed the cached copy of any given search result, which was useful for slower Internet connections and benefitted by Google Web Accelerator until its discontinuation in 2008. This feature does not exist for the mobile version.

Privacy

Google Watch has raised concerns about Google Toolbar's possible threats to privacy, such as tracking of browsing patterns, automatic installation of updates without the user's knowledge, and a privacy policy that can be revised without notice. The toolbar does not track personally identifiable surfing activities of the end user unless advanced features such as

PageRank PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. Accordin ...

are specifically enabled by the user. It does track "anonymous" statistics, which can reveal a lot of information when correlated with other data, although similar criticisms could be made of Google's online search engine.

Google Compute

Google Compute was a separately downloadable add-on for the Google Toolbar which utilized the user's computer to help the Folding@home

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

project, which studies disease-relevant

protein folding Protein folding is the physical process by which a protein, after Protein biosynthesis, synthesis by a ribosome as a linear chain of Amino acid, amino acids, changes from an unstable random coil into a more ordered protein tertiary structure, t ...

and other

molecular dynamics Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the Motion (physics), physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamics ( ...

. It was founded in March 2002 by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Functionally, it downloaded a small packet of work, performed calculations on it, and uploaded it back to

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. Although it was limited in functionality and scope, it increased Folding@home's participation from 10,000 up to about 30,000 active CPUs. The program ended in October 2005 in favor of the project's official clients, and is no longer available for the Toolbar.

Discontinuation

On December 12, 2021, Google Toolbar was quietly shut down by Google. The website redirected to Toolbar Support, stating the user should install

instead, and showed instructions on how to uninstall Toolbar for those on Internet Explorer. Computers that still have Google Toolbar are not affected. It now redirects to Chrome Support.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Google Toolbar 2000 software Toolbar Discontinued Mozilla plug-ins Browser toolbars ja:Googleのサービス#Google ツールバー