All buttoned up
As the Google Toolbar has gotten more popular, the greatest source of ideas about new features has come from our users. The breadth and variety of these requests is so large that it's hard to satisfy everyone. But then we started noticing engineers on the team had cool hacks on their Toolbars for doing customized searches on our internal bugs database, corporate employee directory, etc... We were barely done asking ourselves whether it was possible to offer this capability in the new Google Toolbar beta when one of the engineers started designing a feature called Custom Buttons. Here are some of the coolest aspects of Custom Buttons and why I think they're a big deal:
1) Simple API: The term API is almost a misnomer -- it literally takes seconds to make one of these. I just can't resist the urge to make a new one every time I run into new website. A couple of simple steps and voila - a new button's sitting on your Toolbar (check out the Getting Started Guide).
2) Flexibility: The simple inclusion of RSS & Atom feeds (and particularly allowing the update of toolbar button icons through feeds) has allowed for buttons like a weather button and a mood ring button.
3) Accessibility: Most users don't even need to make buttons. It takes one click on our buttons gallery or on a website that offers them to install a button for your favorite sites. And the custom buttons we built to search our intranet showed us how valuable a customizable toolbar can be to organizations, so now there's an enterprise version of Google Toolbar that can be securely deployed across a company.
And don't miss some of the other cool features for everyone: a greatly-improved search box for formulating better queries; a streamlined bookmarking interface; and Send-To, for posting or sending content via Gmail, Blogger or SMS.
About Me
Popular Posts
-
Posted by Chikai Ohazama, Google Earth Team We're always trying to improve the imagery in Google Earth and Google Local , but our lates...
-
Posted by Dave Girouard, General Manager, Enterprise We all get better with practice. And while our enterprise search business more than do...
-
Posted by Dennis Hwang, Webmaster and Google Doodler . Last week Google opened our new office in the Victoria area of London, and to mark th...
ADs
Labels Cloud
- ads
- Africa
- apps
- April 1
- Asia
- books + book search
- developers
- doodles
- education and research
- Europe
- free expression
- google for work
- google.org
- googlers and culture
- Latin America
- mobile
- personalization
- photos
- policy and issues
- privacy
- recruiting and hiring
- scholarships
- search
- search trends
- user experience and usability
Labels List Numbered
- ads
- Africa
- apps
- April 1
- Asia
- books + book search
- developers
- doodles
- education and research
- Europe
- free expression
- google for work
- google.org
- googlers and culture
- Latin America
- mobile
- personalization
- photos
- policy and issues
- privacy
- recruiting and hiring
- scholarships
- search
- search trends
- user experience and usability
Video of the day
Social Media
Powered by Blogger.
About Me
Search This Blog
Blog Archive
- June 2006 (18)
- May 2006 (19)
- April 2006 (20)
- March 2006 (20)
- February 2006 (26)
- January 2006 (18)
- December 2005 (18)
- November 2005 (11)
Labels
- ads
- Africa
- apps
- April 1
- Asia
- books + book search
- developers
- doodles
- education and research
- Europe
- free expression
- google for work
- google.org
- googlers and culture
- Latin America
- mobile
- personalization
- photos
- policy and issues
- privacy
- recruiting and hiring
- scholarships
- search
- search trends
- user experience and usability
No comments:
Post a Comment