About Toolbar Options

The Google Toolbar offers a wide range of options to make your web travels more pleasant and productive. To customize your Toolbar, click the Options button or click on the Google logo in your Toolbar and select Options from the drop-down menu. The Options window contains three tabs: Options, More, and AutoFill.

Options Tab

• Searching
  • Use Google site - Specify which Google domain to use for your search. For example, select the google.co.uk domain as the default for your Toolbar searches if you are primarily interested in searching web pages from the United Kingdom. While your first search will be of the entire web, your results page will give you the extra option of viewing only those results within the .uk domain. See also Search Country.
  • Open a new window to display results each time you search - Opens a new browser window instead of displaying results in the current window.
  • Drop-down search history - By default, your previous searches are stored in the drop-down list under the search box. If you would prefer not to keep past searches, clear the checkbox.
  • Highlight button - Highlights the words you entered in the search box wherever they appear on the current page. Each term you searched for appears with a different background color. Click the highlight button to toggle this feature on or off.
  • Word find buttons - Finds the words you searched for, wherever they appear on the current page. Word find buttons appear on the right end of the Toolbar as you type them into the search box. Click a word find button and you jump to that term on the page in your browser. Click the word find button again to find the second instance of the word, and so on. At the end of the page, clicking the button cycles through the instances of that word again. If you enter two words, a second word-find button appears in the Toolbar for the second word. If you delete the words from the search box, or replace them, the buttons adjust to what you do.
  • Browse By Name - Save time by typing names instead of URLs into your browser's address bar. Learn more.

• Page Information
  • PageRank™ display - Gives an indication of the PageRank™ for the page you're currently viewing. PageRank is the importance Google assigns to a page based on an automatic calculation that factors in the link structure of the web and many other variables. In order to automatically update this display for each page you visit, the Toolbar sends information about the page you are viewing to the Google servers. Google, Inc. does not collect information that directly identifies you (e.g., your name, email address) and will not sell or provide personally identifiable information to any third parties. We strongly encourage you to read our privacy policy for more information on this topic. If you decide to disable this functionality, you will no longer see the PageRank for pages you visit.
  • Page Info button - Gives you access to more information about the page you're viewing. From the button's drop-down menu, you can choose the following options:
    • Cached Snapshot of Page: Shows a snapshot of the current page as it looked when Google crawled it.
    • Similar Pages: Finds web pages similar to the current page.
    • Backward Links: Shows which pages link to the current page.
    • Translate into English: Translates web pages into English.

• Accessories
  • Pop-up Blocker - Prevents annoying popup ads from appearing over, under, and next to websites you visit. For more details, check out our pop-up blocker.
  • AutoFill button - Eliminates the need to type your personal information into web forms (such as store shopping carts). Enter the information you want stored on your computer. This information is secure and will not be transmitted unless you tell AutoFill to place it into a form. If AutoFill thinks it can fill in information based on what you've told it, it displays the field it wants to fill in yellow and asks your permission to plug in your data (e.g., name or address).
  • BlogThis! - "Blog" stands for web log, your own online journal for publishing information on the web. The Blogger site is currently only available in English. To use this feature you must set up a free account with Google's Blogger service. If you have an existing Blogger account already, you can use that as well. When you use BlogThis!, you create a blog post that points to the web page you're visiting. If you highlight text on the web page, that text will also appear in your blog post.
  • News button - Takes you directly to Google News, which culls information from thousands of news sources worldwide and automatically presents the most relevant news first. Topics are updated continuously, so you see new stories each time you visit.

• Configuration
  • Options button - Opens the Toolbar Options window. Although the Options command is already in the Google logo drop-down menu, you may want to keep an Options button readily available on the Toolbar itself.

• Restore Defaults
  • Returns the default settings to what they were when you downloaded the Toolbar.

More Tab

• Search Options
  • Save the search history across browser sessions - Keeps track of your prior searches.
  • Automatically search when you select from the search history - Performs a search again if you select it from your search history list.
  • Remember last search type - Search type refers to the kinds of searches you see when you click the drop-down arrow next to Search Web on the Toolbar. Select this option if you want the Toolbar to remember the type of search you selected here, especially if it was something other than a web search. (e.g. Current Site, Google Images, I'm Feeling Lucky, etc.)
  • Use Google as my default search engine in Internet Explorer - This is a simple way to set your Internet Explorer browser to search using Google if it can't find the URL you entered. .
  • Include special searches on search menu - The "special searches" perform a Google search on these specific subjects: Linux, BSD Unix, US Government, Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft. If you often search on one or more of these subjects, check this option.

• Web buttons
  • Up - Enables you to navigate up one level in the site you're currently visiting. For example, if you are currently viewing http://www.example.com/articles/may/money.html:
    • Clicking Up takes you to: http://www.example.com/articles/may/
    • Clicking Up again takes you to: http://www.example.com/articles/
  • Next & Previous - These buttons take you to the next or the previous result for the current search without returning to the Google search results page. It works only on the first page of results, taking you from one URL to another through the first 10 results.
  • Category - If the page you are viewing has a related category in the Google Web Directory, clicking this button takes you to that category page. The Category button is one of the Toolbar's advanced features, which sends information back to Google when it's activated. We encourage you to review our Toolbar privacy policy to see what this entails.
  • Voting Buttons - You can vote for or against a page or search result by using these buttons. Click the happy or unhappy faces to tell Google that you like or dislike a particular page. These buttons also can be used to report especially good or bad results after searching with Google. Indicate satisfaction or dissatisfaction with your results by clicking the appropriate button while still on the search results page. This feature is in test mode for now, so you won't see any immediate effects by voting for or against a page.

• Extra search buttons
  • The Combo button - Includes different types of searches in one drop-down menu. If you select the "Remember last search type" option, what you choose in the Combo menu continues to be the default search type until you choose another type of search. For example, if you choose "Google Images," it conducts subsequent searches as image searches, not web searches.
  • Search Site - Enter your search terms in the text box, then click "Search Site" to search for your terms just within the pages of the current website.
  • I'm Feeling Lucky™ - Automatically takes you to the top result Google returned for your query. You go directly to that website, so you don't see the other search results found by Google.
  • Search Images - Gives you access to Google's Image Search, the most comprehensive on the web. Enter a query in the Toolbar Search Box and click the Search Images button.
  • Search Groups - Enables you to easily search within Google Groups, Google's Usenet archive. To use this service, enter your search text into the Toolbar search box and click the Search Groups button.
  • Search Directory - Search the Web Directory, which combines the Open Directory Project (the largest human-edited directory on the web) with Google's own ranking system to give you an extremely useful tool for finding information within a broad set of categories. Just enter your search terms into the Toolbar search box and click the Search Directory button.
  • Search Froogle - Froogle is Google's product search service. Type what you want to find in the search box and Froogle displays links to relevant products and the stores that sell them. Froogle features include photos and a way to sort your results by price.
  • Search Country - If you have a domain other than www.google.com selected in the Use Google site drop-down list (on the Options tab), you can use this option to quickly restrict the search to your preferred country domain. For example, if you select Use Google site google.ca, then the country search returns results for Canada. (Search Country is not available unless you have a domain other than www.google.com selected in the Use Google site list.)
• Extras
  • Button text labels - You can select how you want the buttons to appear on your Toolbar.
    • All text
    • Selective text only
    • No text
  • Automatically highlight fields that AutoFill can fill - AutoFill detects fields it can fill with the information you've given it and highlights those fields in yellow. Clear the checkbox if you prefer not to see the yellow highlights.
  • Play a sound when blocking pop-ups

Autofill Tab

The third tab in the Toolbar Options window is AutoFill. The nifty AutoFill feature deserves its very own page.

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