Google toolbar

Google Toolbar is a web browser toolbar for Internet Explorer, developed by Google. It was first released in 2000 for Internet Explorer 5. Google Toolbar was also supported on Firefox from September 2005 to June 2011.

Google Toolbar resides above the browser's tab bar and provides a search box to carry out web searches. Users can log into their Gmail accounts and access their email, saved bookmarks, and web history. It has tools such as AutoLink, AutoFill, translation, spell checker common to all browsers, while pop-up blocker and word finder are restricted to Internet Explorer. Google Toolbar is often distributed through product bundling with a primary download.

My Location is a geolocation service which uses the location of Wi-Fi access points to determine the toolbar user's location. This location is used to optimize search results based on where the user is located. Google Toolbar can also provide the geolocation data to third-party websites through the W3C Geolocation API.

Google Toolbar was criticized when the AutoLink feature was added to the toolbar because this new feature directed users to pre-selected commercial websites such as Amazon.com and Google Maps. For example, if it finds a book's ISBN number on a webpage, it provides 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."

New features:

System Requirements: Windows 95, 98, 2000 or NT, and version 5.0 or higher of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

New features:

System Requirements: Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

...
Wikipedia