Once you’ve typed some words in the search box, you can press Enter or click the Search button (the one with the G for Google) to begin your search. But the down arrow on the right end of the Search button is the gateway to a handful of other searches Google can perform (Figure 6-4)—things like searching Google’s image library and directory (both explained in Chapter 3). Just type in some terms, click the arrow, and select the special search you want to run.

The Google button to the left of the search box contains a menu of links to Google’s home page and its other search services (Advanced Search, Google Images, Google Groups, and so on)—most of which you can also get to via optional buttons on the toolbar, described in the next section. The menu also includes a choice for Options, which brings up the dialog box shown in Figure 6-5.

The Google menu has one feature—Clear Search History—that you can’t get to any other way, and it’s useful. Here’s the story: The toolbar keeps a list of your searches, which you can find by clicking the down arrow on the right end of the search bar. That way, if you want to rerun a search, you don’t have to retype your terms. Instead, you can just open the list to find and select your original search; you don’t even have to press Enter to run it.

Figure 6-5. The Toolbar Options dialog box lets you control which buttons appear on the Google toolbar and how some of the features behave. You can also choose whether the buttons have text on them or just icons. To do so, choose the More tab, and under Extras, click “All text,” “Selective text only” (which puts words on a few key buttons), or “No text.”

But if you’re trying to plan a surprise birthday party for your wife, and you don’t want her to see you’ve been searching for "novelty cakes" and "SpongeBob party favors“, you can wipe clean the list of searches. Simply choose Google → Clear Search History. (You might also consider clearing the browser’s history, which is a list of all the sites you’ve visited recently. In Internet Explorer, choose Tools → Internet Options, and on the General tab, click the Clear History button. To prevent it from ever storing the sites you’ve visited, set “Days to keep pages in history” to zero. [Other browsers work similarly; use their help files if you can’t find where the Clear History button is.])

Finally, the Google menu gives you five links to Google help pages:

Use this button when you want to find your search terms just on the pages of the current site open in your browser, rather than on the whole Web. For example, if you’re on HBO.com and the site won’t let you search for pages that mention Sarah Jessica Parker without Kim Cattrall, try the Google site search, which lets you construct any Google search for that site alone.

This button works just like the button on Google’s home page (see Section 1.3). It bypasses the results page altogether, which is a nice way to eliminate a few clicks when you suspect Google’s first instinct will be the page you want to visit.

These buttons run your search in Google’s alternate universes, described in detail in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. To use them, simply type your search terms into the blank box, and then click the button for the area you want to search. For example, to search for pictures of wildfires, type in the word and click the Images button. Instead of running your search on the whole Web—which could bring up definitions of wildfires, instructions for putting them out, and other flotsam—Google runs your search only in its listing of images.

These buttons are a huge timesaver. Suppose you’ve just run a Google search and, from the results page, you clicked through to a certain Web site. If, once you’re there, you find you want to go to the next or previous page on your list of results, simply click the appropriate button—no need to return to the page of Google results. Even better, the buttons work after you’ve clicked deeply into a site.

So, for example, if you search for movies, your top results include Movies.com, The Internet Movie Database, Hollywood.com, and Yahoo Movies. If you click through to The Internet Movie Database and surf around the site for ten minutes, winding up on an obscure page that shows whether Cary Grant ever collaborated with Keanu Reeves, you can jump directly to Movies.com or Hollywood.com without backing up to your results page or running the movies search again. Just click Previous or Next, and Google takes you directly to that result.

The News button takes you directly to http://news.google.com/, Google’s news culling service, described in Section 3.2.

PageRank is Google’s system for determining the importance of every page it records (Section 3.2.1). This toolbar icon displays a green bar that fills in to show you how Google ranks the site you’re on right now. If you mouse over the icon, a small box appears, telling you what rank—on a scale from 1 to 10—Google gives the current page.

Checking PageRank is really a geek activity, of greatest interest to people who run Web sites and want to know how Google is rating them. For more on PageRank and Webmastering, see Chapter 8.

The Page Info button opens a menu with four choices to see more information about the page you’re currently on. It’s a quick way to dig deep without returning to your results page (or creating one in the first place) or heading to the Advanced Search form (Section 2.2). Here’s what you can get:

Pop-up ads—the little advertisement windows that sprout like mushrooms in a damp basement—are a real impediment to productivity, forcing you to spend half the day closing them. Better to use a pop-up blocker, which prevents these annoyances from opening as you surf the Web. The Google toolbar has a built-in pop-up blocker that provides relief from this perpetual pest.

When Google blocks a pop-up window, your cursor briefly displays a little Pow! symbol, the browser makes a noise, and the toolbar button tells you how many pop-ups Google has blocked. (You can turn off the counter if it annoys you. In the Toolbar Options dialog box, go to the More tab, and choose “Hide popup blocker count.” You can also squelch the noise by turning off “Play a sound when blocking pop-ups.”)

But not everybody wants to block pop-ups all the time. Some pop-ups aren’t ads at all—in fact, they’re an important part of certain Web pages. They can be coupons you want, forms you have to complete, or even email messages on a Web-based email system. To preserve these friendly pop-ups, you have two choices. You can tell Google to let all the pop-up windows through on a specific Web site. (Do so by clicking the pop-ups button while you’re on that site.) Or you can allow pop-ups on a case-by-case basis: Leave the pop-up blocker on and Ctrl-click the link or button for a pop-up you want to see. (You’ll know which link or button to Ctrl-click because, if you have pop-up blocking turned on, nothing will happen when you first try to click through.)

Even in this crazy world of point-and-click, you still have to do a fair bit of typing on the Web—think of your Web-based email program, your Amazon.com reader reviews, your Google Group discussions (Section 4.1). If you’ve ever wished there were a way to check your online typing for typos and spelling errors, Google has heard your wishes and bestowed a spell checker in the latest version of the Toolbar.

As shown in Figure 6-7, after you click the “Check” button on the Toolbar, Google scans your text for errors and highlights any suspect words. To correct misspelled words automatically, click the green arrow next to the SpellCheck button in the Toolbar and choose AutoFix. If AutoFix is feeling neurotic about a word it doesn’t recognize, it leaves it highlighted for you to deal with.

Wouldn’t it be great if all companies had a map of their location on their Web sites so you wouldn’t have to go mucking around on a map site? For those Web sites that are map-free, the Toolbar comes to the rescue with its AutoLink function. When you click the AutoLink button, the Toolbar scans the page for U.S. street addresses and then presents you with a link to click through for a map to the exact location.

Figure 6-7. The Toolbar’s SpellCheck feature rats out those misspellings and typos on your Web forms and Web-based email. SpellCheck highlights suspicious words for you, and if you want to take a chance on the program’s proofreading skills, click the AutoFix button to clean things up automatically.

AutoLink works for more than just finding that new Burmese restaurant in town—you can also use it to hunt down books, car information, and tracking and delivery info from FedEx and UPS. You just need to be on a Web page where a book’s ISBN number, a car’s VIN number, or a package-tracking number is displayed. Click the AutoLink button to see those numbers available as links, as shown in Figure 6-8. When you select one of those links, the Toolbar pops open a window of relevant information—the book’s page on your favorite online bookstore, for example.

By default, AutoLink goes to Amazon.com for its book info, CarFax for its vehicle identification data, and Google Maps for its maps, but you can change these settings. To change the source where AutoLink gets its information, click the arrow next to the AutoLink button and then choose Change Default Provider. Use the drop-down menus to change the place that AutoLink uses for reference.

If you’re the type who can’t make it through the day without buying something online, AutoFill can save you scads of time filling out order forms and other pages on the Web. The feature lets you store your name, address, and other information in one place on your computer. Then, when you visit sites with blank forms, Google highlights in yellow the spaces it recognizes; when you press the AutoFill button, the yellow spaces fill in with your info (Figure 6-9). You could take an annual weeklong cruise with the time you save pecking through forms.

To set up AutoFill, open the Toolbar Options dialog box and click the Browsing tab (Figure 6-10). Click the AutoFill settings button and fill in as much of the form as you’d like. AutoFill stores your information on your computer—not on Google’s, so the company never sees what you’ve written down. When you’re ready to use AutoFill, simply click the AutoFill button to work the magic. Bear in mind, though, that anyone else who uses your computer can see whatever you’ve typed on the AutoFill form.

Figure 6-8. AutoLink scans the page for a street addresses and then offers you a quick link to a map of your desired location.

Figure 6-9. When you click the AutoFill button, your computer fills in any highlighted boxes. Some Web pages have invisible boxes, however, and you can wind up sending, say, your phone number without even realizing it. To find out which info AutoFill is supplying, Shift-click the AutoFill button, which opens a small window telling you the data it’s going to fill in.

Figure 6-10. The Google toolbar can fill in your name, address, phone number, and credit card information, among other things. For more information on what to put in each space, check out http://toolbar.google.com/autofill_help.html.

The exception is credit card information, which AutoFill lets you store in a way that nobody else can see or use without a password. This is fortunate, of course, because it prevents your 4-year-old from buying Barney CDs online without your permission. Here’s how it works: After you fill out the credit card info, press Set Password to bring up a dialog box that lets you create a password. Once you’ve done so, you can’t use or edit the credit card info without the password. And—cleverly—if you forget your password, AutoFill deletes the credit card number instead of prompting you (or a snooping family member) with a not-so-top-secret hint like “mother’s maiden name” or “favorite pet.”

The downside to storing credit card info on your computer is that it may be vulnerable to hackers. Although AutoFill encrypts your data when it saves it on your hard drive, and Google claims it’s safe, some privacy experts believe it’s smarter to keep your computer free of truly sensitive numbers. You’ll have to let your tolerance for risk—and inconvenience—guide your decision.

The yellow and blue smiley and frowny faces are what Google calls voting buttons. If you particularly like or dislike a set of results from Google or a Web page you’re visiting, you can tell Google by clicking one of these buttons. Weirdly, when you do so, nothing seems to happen—except for maybe a note’s appearing at the bottom of your browser saying that Google has recorded your vote. So what does Google do with your votes? A company spokesperson says, “We use this information in aggregate to help us improve the overall quality of search results.” The Pentagon gives more direct answers. Vote at your discretion.

If you’ve never heard of a blog and suspect it’s some kind of stain, see the box in Section 6.1.4.16. But if you have a blog—whether hosted by the Google-owned Blogger service or any other blogging site—this button is a big old blogging bonus.

When you’re visiting a Web page that you want to note on your blog, click BlogThis! to automatically create a new post that includes a link to the current page. Or highlight text on a Web page and click BlogThis! to create a new post that includes the whole selection. In either case, clicking the button opens a small window for your new post with its fresh link and/or text, ready to edit or publish directly.

The Options button opens the Toolbar Options dialog box. It’s handy to keep on the toolbar if you like to change your toolbar configuration often. Otherwise, you can open the dialog box from the menu under the Google button.

The Up button lets you move through the levels of the site you’re on, which means you can jump from a page deep within a site to a page closer to the home page without running a new search.

To understand the usefulness of this feature, it helps to think of the structure of a Web site like a family tree. At the top is the mother of all pages on that site (called the home page), and under it are a couple of branches that contain the other pages on the same site. Under those pages are branches filled with even more pages. In a URL (for example, www.raelity.org/gadget), the levels of a site are separated by slashes (/). That’s why some Web addresses look like this:

	http://www.raelity.org/gadget/pda/palm/

(That site has tips on updating the memory on a certain PalmPilot.)

If your Google results take you to such a page, you could find yourself wondering what else the site has to say about gadgets or just what the raelity.org site is, exactly. Click the Up button to move through a site’s levels one at a time. In this case, you’ll move next to:

	http://www.raelity.org/gadget/pda

and then to:

	http://www.raelity.org/gadget

and then to:

	http://www.raelity.org

Or click the arrow on the right side of the button to get a list of the current site’s levels, as shown in Figure 6-11, and then select one to jump to that page.

Sometimes, it’s handy to highlight all the instances of a word or phrase on a page, making them easier to find or count. For example, if you’re on a very long, text-heavy page, and you want to find any mention of lobster or cryonics, you could burn out your eyeballs scrolling through the text. Instead, use the Highlight button to have Google block out your terms in hard-to-miss colors, as if it had hit them with an electronic highlighter pen. (Google highlights each word or quoted phrase in a different color, as shown in Figure 6-12.) The cool thing about this highlight feature is that you don’t need to run a search to use it. Just type the words you want to find into the search box—but instead of hitting Enter, click the Highlight button. (To turn off the highlighting, click the button again.)

Figure 6-11. You can also navigate through a site by clicking the end of the URL in the address bar (or by pressing Ctrl+Tab, and then the right arrow key), and then deleting back through the slashes until you get to the page you want to visit. Press Enter to go there.

Figure 6-12. If you’re using a friend’s computer, and he isn’t savvy enough to have installed the toolbar, you may still be able to highlight your search terms by using Google’s cache feature, explained in Section 1.4.1.4. Simply run a Google search that includes in its results the page on which you want to see the highlighted terms. Click the Cached link for that page, and Google automatically highlights your search terms. (The possible glitch here, though, is that the cached page may be outdated.)

Like the Highlight button, the Word Find buttons help you locate instances of a word or phrase on the current Web page. Instead of coloring them, however, these buttons, shown in Figure 6-13, jump to the terms. Also, like the Highlight button, you don’t have to run a search to use the word buttons. Just type the words you want to find into the search box, but instead of hitting Enter, click the appropriate word button. Each time you click a button, you move to the next instance of that word or phrase. To go backwards, hold down Shift while clicking a button.

Figure 6-13. The word-find buttons appear at the right end of the toolbar. Individual words get their own buttons, but if you want to search for two or more words together, like blue moon, put quotes around them.

In fact, the Word Find feature is really useful in combination with highlighting. If you first highlight your terms and then use Word Find to skip to them, they’re even easier to find.

If you want to search for exact word matches only—say, punk but not spunky—press Ctrl when you click the punk button to have Google skip any words that contain punk along with other stuff.

If you often use one of Google’s internationally based search sites (Section 2.4), you can add a toolbar button to run searches from the Google site of your favorite country. For example, if you do a lot of business in Brazil and you frequently want to search for pages from Brazilian sites, this button can save you a lot of clicking.

Setting up the button is a quick two-part process. First, open the Toolbar Options dialog box. At the bottom of the Search tab, pull down the “Use Google site” menu and pick a country. (For this example, say you picked Australia.) Second, under the “Add Google Search buttons to your Toolbar” area just above, turn on the “Search Australia” button that just appeared.

Now Google doesn’t automatically restrict searches to the country you’ve chosen unless you click the country button you’ve just added. If you type in search terms and press Enter or Search Web, you get results from Google’s regular site (which searches Web sites from anywhere in the world). But when you run a regular search, at the top of your results page, Google includes an option to run your search again and limit it to pages from the country you’ve specified—or pages in the language of that country (Figure 6-14).

Figure 6-14. Use the country button to get results from sites in that country only. Or run a search as usual and then, at the top of the results page, select the country option to restrict your search. Press Enter or click Google Search to run your alternate search.

The workaround for getting your results back in English is simple: Head to Google’s Preferences page and change your interface language to English, and then click Save Preferences (or Salvar Preferencias, if Google is speaking to you in Portuguese). The only problem with this solution is that your results pages now omit the option to run your search again on the alternate Google site. Still, the toolbar keeps your last search in the search box, so you can simply click the country button if you don’t find what you want in a regular search.

If English isn’t your first language (or it is your first language and you’re trying to learn a second one), Google Toolbar’s WordTranslator feature beats the heck out of thumbing through a dictionary or leaping in and out of Google’s Language Tools page (Section 2.4) to look up words.

To turn on the translator, click the Options button on the Toolbar (Section 6.1.3) and then, on the Browsing tab, turn on the checkbox for WordTranslator. Click the Translator Settings button and select the language you want to see onscreen when you point the mouse at an unfamiliar English word. Your tongue choices here include French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and both simplified and traditional Chinese.

WordTranslator doesn’t exist as a Toolbar button—it just hitches along for the ride as you surf along and leaps into action when you hover the mouse over an unfamiliar word. Figure 6-15 shows you an example of WordTranslator at work.

Safari itself incorporates a couple of handy features that are part of the Google toolbar:

Mozilla 1.7.8 and Netscape 8.0—the latest versions of each, as of this writing—look similar and act nearly the same. The most obvious difference is that Mozilla installs with different themes. (A theme describes the way a program looks—things like the colors and shape of the buttons, icons, and other interface elements.) But the two browsers are typically used by different types of people.

Figure 6-18. The Googlebar is shown here in Firefox, though it is also available for Mozilla and Netscape. This picture shows a customized array of buttons. To choose which buttons appear on the Googlebar, right-click anywhere along it to bring up a menu of options.

Mozilla is popular with programmers and other geek types because it comes with a seemingly infinite number of settings you can tweak, and because it always has a test version that’s slightly more advanced than Netscape’s latest version. Netscape, on the other hand, is owned by AOL. So while it comes with the same basic features Mozilla has, it includes AOL Instant Messenger, a shopping button, and a few other extras that make it appealing to civilians.

But Netscape also has a few notable problems. It harbors windows that crop up regularly, exhorting you to join the Netscape Network—an unnecessary distraction. And Netscape installs extra programs (like Rediscover AOL) and desktop icons, even if you don’t ask for them.

On the bright side, AOL has made an effort to get Netscape up to speed in today’s world; version 8.0 has self-configured settings that make it safer from the get-go, along with security features that warn you against spyware that might be trying to jack your system. The new version also comes with a Passcard Manager function that remembers your user names and passwords, just like AutoFill.

If Mozilla is too complicated and Netscape is too clogged up with AOL clutter, a third option, Firefox, might be juuuust right. Unlike Mozilla and Netscape, which come loaded with an email program, a Web page composer, chat tools, and tons of features that many people don’t use, Firefox is a standalone browser that incorporates only the most popular tools and settings. Not only does this arrangement make Firefox easier for the average person to use, but it also means the program is speedier and takes up less room on your hard drive. (If you want a automatic weather report in your browser window, a built-in dictionary, or many other tasty features that let you do other things in your Web browser, Firefox offers dozens of extensions, otherwise known as add-ons, that you can easily install. For a list, check out http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/main.php/Firefox). The Autofill extension (http://autofill.mozdev.org) is a popular one for people who covet the Google Toolbar’s time- and type-saving feature.

In addition to its lightweight configuration, Firefox has a sleek interface, state-of-the-tech security, pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, and many other nifty features, including a built-in Google search box (which also lets you search for a term on the page you’re currently viewing). For fancier features, you can add the Googlebar—or regular Google toolbar—to Firefox. And if you type a search term into the address bar, it automatically runs a Google I’m Feeling Lucky search.

Firefox, which suffers from far fewer security holes and exploitable issues than Microsoft’s dominant Internet Explorer, saw an uptick in popularity when its first official version was released. The underlying technology is the same as Mozilla’s, and there are a few problems, like the occasional misspelled menu item or a cookie setting that includes the observation, “Cookies are delicious delicacies,” inserted by an engineer with a raging sense of humor.

For a nice set of answers to frequently asked questions about Firefox, see www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/faq. To download it, head over to www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/, choose your operating system, and let ‘er rip.

The Googlebar works with Firefox, Mozilla, and newer versions of Netscape (7.0 or later). Installing it is a snap: Just visit http://googlebar.mozdev.org/installation.html, scroll down past the experimental version to the first version below that (currently 0.9.5), and click Install. Your browser handles the installation and then prompts you to restart the browser. That’s it.

You run a search from the Googlebar by typing your terms into the blank box and then pressing Enter; your browser shows you regular Google results as if you’d searched from the Google home page. If you have tabbed browsing set up (Section 6.1.4.19), you can open a search in a new tab by pressing Ctrl (or, if you use a Mac, ⌘) when you press Enter or click on any button on the Googlebar.

If your first search seems to yield results in Spanish or some other language you didn’t choose, your Googlebar installed itself with a twist. To fix it, click the button at the left edge of the toolbar, marked “G,” to open a menu of choices for Google pages. Toward the bottom of the menu is a choice called “Gooblebar options,” which opens a dialog box that lets you adjust settings on the Googlebar. Open the dialog box and then click the tab labeled “Google Sites.” Change the first item, “Select international version of Google Search,” to the United States (or wherever you’d like) and then click OK.

To see a history of your searches, click the arrow on the right end of the search box, as shown in Figure 6-19, or click in the search box and press the down arrow on your keyboard.

Figure 6-19. You can choose how many search results show up in the Googlebar’s history. On the far-left edge of the search box, click the “G” to bring up a menu, and then choose “Googlebar options.” Click the Miscellaneous tab, and in the Save History section at the top, make sure “Preserve history across browser sessions” is turned on. Then use the “Maximum number of search terms kept in history” menu to pick how many searches the Googlebar saves. If you frequently rerun searches, consider storing a lot of them. But if you share your computer with other people and don’t want them to know what you’ve been up to, you might want to clear your history with the option on the “G” menu—or turn off the history altogether.

In most respects, the Gooblebar works just like the regular old Google toolbar, and it includes nearly all the same features listed in Section 6.1.4. For example, to search any of Google’s special sections, like Images or the Directory, you type your terms and click the appropriate button (if you mouse over a button, a little box appears telling you what it does). You can choose which buttons appear on the Googlebar by right-clicking anywhere along it to bring up a contextual menu, as described in Figure 6-20.

Figure 6-20. If you don’t run special searches very often, you can turn off nearly all the buttons and still keep a tidy menu of them on the Googlebar for the occasional oddball search. The button for the menu looks like a magnifying glass. If you don’t see it, right-click the Googlebar to open the contextual menu, then choose Special searches → Combined menu.

The Googlebar has a few features that aren’t on Google’s own toolbar, including buttons for Catalog search (Section 5.2.1), Google Answers (Section 4.2), and computer and university searches (Section 2.2.1.7). If you regularly search any of these offbeat areas, the Googlebar can save you precious clicks.

So what’s missing from the Googlebar? A few buttons: PageRank, BlogThis!, AutoFill, the voting buttons, and the PopUp Blocker. If you really need those features, switch to Google’s own toolbar—but keep in mind that you’ll have to switch to a new browser, too, unless you’re already using Firefox.

OmniWeb, which works on Mac OS X only, lets you run a Google search from the address box. You can type directly into it, but you have to preface your search with the word google, like this:

	google poker equipment

Press Return to run your search and get a Google listing of gambling supply sites.

OmniWeb has a reputation for fast browsing, and the latest version features ad blocking and versatile tabs that come with a thumbnail view of the tabbed page. It’s free to try for 30 days (and $30 to buy after those 30 days are up). You can download it from www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb.

The Opera browser, which works on every major operating system in the world, has a built-in search bar with options for Google and a slew of other search engines. You can even search for video clips, MP3s, and other goodies—and Opera has tons of cool customization features. You can download it for free from www.opera.com.