Google Toolbar Beta 4

Posted by Miles Evans

Google launched their latest beta of their popular toolbar today. The 650kb update of Google Toolbar Beta 4 promises some interesting new features obviously geared at increasing CPC figures. Here are the major changes:

Check your spelling whenever you type in web forms
Translate English words into other languages
Turn street addresses into links to online maps

As with Firefox users Google toolbar now has the ability to suggest keywords based on the search history of other users. Quite cool. So in regards to CPC users like, well me for instance, this could lead to an overall improvement of users not clicking on erroneous or flawed SERPS. In other words all those ads we enjoyed at 0.5 cents all these years? You can expect those campaigns to bottom out a bit.

Doing well on misspellings in Adwords? You will be pleased to know misspelled keywords should experience some dramatic changes too I would image.

So what’s the good news? Also new is the availability of custom buttons or booksmarks you can add right to the interface with handy widgets for weather, news, and my favorite – Google Video. Placing bookmarks INSIDE THE TOOLBAR means Google can more certainly track another type of user feedback, and they may even be able to use that user data to augment their link analysis. Much like how Trustrank can be used to flag high authority sites with low quality link popularity for manual review, Google may augment that to include high authority sites with few site visitors and/or few site bookmarkers. Very cool new feature IMO with some possibly interesting future evelopments.

A new button at the rightmost portion of the sidebar allows to sign into your Google account and indicates you are signed in with a green light.

The all important PR indicator is now a button allowing users to see Google's cached, similiar and backlinks for the page you are viewing. Very handy indeed.

For a complete list of uber cool things to do with your toolbar check here: http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/T4/index.html. Yep there is even a button for /.

Posted Jan 31, 2006 at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!