Google Toolbar

...Many Internet users choose Google as their default search engine but relatively few appear to know of the additional tools Google makes available for best use of their engine, this opinion is about one in particular of these tools, the Google Toolbar. The Toolbar is rather more widely available than most Internet users realise, Google only offer it as an add-on to Internet Explorer but, more recently, it has been ported (reworked to run under a different ...
...amongst others, thus allowing the Google Toolbar port to also be run on these platforms.

Let us suppose you are reading a few opinions on Ciao, some from the latest 20 perhaps, one such opinion seems too good, too polished, too professional and when you read through it the standard of English used is too perfect for most amateur writers to have produced…do you just ignore it or do you feel some responsibility for this site and wish ... more

Most members of this site will, at some time or another, notice a copied opinion, or twenty, many of these are obvious enough and produced by fools who are soon caught but if one wishes to make sure of one’s facts when an opinion just seems that bit too well written compared to the “author’s” previous work or simply rings bells as something one has read before there is a piece of software available, for free, that will aid one enormously.

Many Internet users choose Google as their default search engine but relatively few appear to know of the additional tools Google makes available for best use of their engine, this opinion is about one in particular of these tools, the Google Toolbar. The Toolbar is rather more widely available than most Internet users realise, Google only offer it as an add-on to Internet Explorer but, more recently, it has been ported (reworked to run under a different system) to the Mozilla Suite and Mozilla Firebird browsers (available as a free extension to either but not included in the basic installation packages). The Mozilla products are cross platform software and will run under all versions of Windows, all the Linux distributions and the Apple Macintosh range of operating systems, amongst others, thus allowing the Google Toolbar port to also be run on these platforms.

Let us suppose you are reading a few opinions on Ciao, some from the latest 20 perhaps, one such opinion seems too good, too polished, too professional and when you read through it the standard of English used is too perfect for most amateur writers to have produced…do you just ignore it or do you feel some responsibility for this site and wish to weed out the cheats and plagiarists? I hope that your reaction will be to decide to help police the site and that you might first see if the author of such an opinion has written other pieces of a similar standard on this site…if the new opinion is of a far better quality than the author’s other work alarm bells should be ringing in your mind and the Google Toolbar be at your call. Using the Toolbar to test out your theory is easy enough, just cut and paste some of the offending text into the toolbar’s workspace and test it out with a Google search. The search Google runs is one that tests for other instances of the specific words entered in the specific order in which they are entered so it is quite exacting and if a positive result is obtained you may be certain that you have hit pay dirt but test out a few other passages in the offending opinion before you report the cheating scoundrel to Ciao by using the following e-mail address: abuse.uk@team.ciao.com
Please quote all your findings from the searches you have run in your mail to Ciao and keep quiet on site about what you have found; it may be worth notifying any member you know well who has rated the opinion highly by means of e-mail but this is entirely optional. If you make a fuss about copied opinions on site you virtually guarantee that abuse from the plagiarist or his/her friends will come your way and unless you are a masochist this is best avoided. If you still have doubts about an opinion’s authenticity a brief note to one of the site guides or category assistants may be as good a way as any to allay your concerns or nail the cheat, whichever may be appropriate, a request to “take a look at” the opinion will be sufficient without a need to spell out the details (the guides and category assistants aren’t daft and will know what you mean).

Let’s get back to the Toolbar itself: it has a number of notable features principally it allows you to select a word or phrase from within the text you are viewing in a browser then have a search run via Google and on this selected text. Users may then choose to have the results of the search presented in order of their “popularity” on the Internet or have a list of links to sites offering the same text (as per a normal search). The point of the first offering is to show how common the selected text may be and thus if it is uncommon that the likelihood of it’s being copied is higher than if it were a common word or phrase that a writer would be more likely to have chosen for him/her self.

A word of warning is in order at this point I feel; there was a flaw in earlier versions of the Google Toolbar software, a flaw in the Google Toolbar version 1.1.58 and earlier, that exposed the users computer(s) to various and serious forms of attack including allowing an attacker to run malicious code on a user's PC(s), read private files, and carry out other intrusions. If you haven’t upgraded to a new version of the Google Toolbar software or are in any way uncertain of the vintage of your installation may I urge to upgrade; the flaw should have been fixed via Google’s automatic update feature but as this is viewed by many users (myself included) as a risky way to run updates it may be blocked on your computer. In general it is best to avoid automatic updates as they take the ability to check that an update is a sensible step away from users. I can’t fault Google for it’s responsiveness to the reports of this flaw but would be happier still had the flaw not existed; users who block the automatic updates from Google need to pay close attention to ensure that such security updates are downloaded and installed. Various sites on the Internet, such as Version tracker, offer a service whereby you may be informed when software is updated (http://www.techtracker.com/products/versiontracker).

When installing the Google Toolbar into Internet Explorer you will be asked if you are willing to have anonymous information sent to Google and to have Google set as your default search engine, I choose to refuse both options and would advise that you do the same. I see no reason to give information to Google or anyone else as if they do have a change of heart and release it to third parties or have their security compromised it will be too late for users to prevent their personal information being compromised, better to be ultra cautious as you lose nothing by refusing these options. Preventing the setting of Google as your default search engine simply makes for a less intrusive installation and thus less to go wrong, as ever I take few chances!

The Toolbar has several options available; you may have a new window open for each search or reuse the current window, you may choose to have a drop down search history enabled, you may select the Google site used for the searches (English or foreign as suits your needs), you may have the highlight button enabled (as stated above this allows for easy checking of text), you may have the “word find” button enabled (allows for dictionary and thesaurus type searches). Additional features of the Toolbar include: pop-up blocker (useful in Internet Explorer), auto fill of forms (a security risk but useful to some, it needs to store data on your computer so this data might be compromised at some point N.B. I wouldn’t even consider adding credit card information to such a system!), “blog this” a system for posting messages to web logs (a.k.a. blogs) and a “news” option. The Toolbar has many other options too numerous to mention here but safe to say that it is able to offer the full panoply of Google’s services and is highly configurable.

The Toolbar offers Google’s “page rank” system but users should take note that this system was so compromised by unscrupulous “Search Engine Optimisation” companies who offer to have web pages raised to the top of particular search engines listings (one might well regard this as cheating but it can be done by designing the page according to the search engine’s guidelines, publicly available, or by nefarious means), for a not inconsiderable fee, that Google were forced to abandon the use of “page rank” in early ’03 and have no likelihood of ever re-enabling it so the data is fast becoming too out of date to be meaningful. Page-rank was a rather nice system whereby the importance of a particular web page was gauged by ascertaining the links to it from other pages and the good standing in the Internet community of these other pages thus giving a form of peer review but it was far too open to abuse and its death was inevitable.

Internet Explorer is a rather poor browser (and Microsoft have abandoned further development of the wretch) so although it is “common as muck” you would do well to consider other, better, alternatives such as the Mozilla offerings. Mozilla offer two alternatives for users who wish to have the Google Toolbar available to them in a non Microsoft browser, Mozilla Firebird (slimmed down and fast with a high level of security and user defined setup) or the Mozilla Suite (big, bloated and thus slow by comparison to Firebird but offering a wealth of custom settings unparalleled by any other browser), in each case the Google Toolbar doesn’t come as part of the basic installation but must be added by the user from amidst a vast list of other available extensions (Mozilla term their add-on components extensions). The Google Toolbar that is offered for Mozilla users is subtly different from the official Google Toolbar. It doesn’t offer to send details to Google, to alter the default search engine or to store user information nor does it need to offer pop-up blocking, as this is already present in the Mozilla browsers, but all the search specific components of the official product are present and just as configurable. One might well say that the Mozilla developers learnt from the mistakes made by Google’s software engineers and designed a better product and this is born out in the much improved layout of the Mozilla version of the Toolbar and its better thought out defaults (including one or two additional features not present in the official version and that aren’t vastly important but make for nice touches).

In conclusion, the Google Toolbar is an excellent addition to browsers and offers abilities of particular use to Ciao members. Thanks to an excellent port to the Mozilla browsers it is not only available in several applications based on the Windows environment but is also available to users of Linux and Apple Macintosh computers (and some less well know systems besides). I highly commend these products and hope that more members will use them to help improve the Ciao site.
Keep your eyes open for the new Google Deskbar; similar in function to the Toolbar but it doesn’t require a browser to be running in order to run Google searches or to be integrated into said browser.

Links:

Google Toolbar (official version for Internet Explorer):

http://toolbar.google.com/

Mozilla Firebird:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/

Mozilla Suite

http://www.mozilla.org/

Mozilla Firebird Extensions (inc. Google Toolbar):

http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions/

Mozilla Suite Googlebar:

http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

Google Deskbar:

http://toolbar.google.com/deskbar

Ciao abuse:

abuse.uk@team.ciao.com

 

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