search engine toolbar-arama

Like my "experience" indicates, "less and less every day ". Because, I installed the google toolbar way back when and concluded that wondering about how to go about searching the internet was resolved. Well, I am aware that google is still supposed to be pretty good, if not the best, but along come all these other wonderful sounding search toolbars, and now I am back to wondering if one/some of these might not be a better way to go than the google toolbar. And, since I don't especially want to spend the next umpteen days trying out all of these toolbars, thought I would run it by you all and see what your expert opinions are on search toolbars/engines. I plugged in some of the text on the toolbars below, but immediately below is the link where I snatched this info from in case anyone wants to check it out (the site has a great newsletter on search engines…).

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156381

Google Toolbar
http://toolbar.google.com
Special toolbar for Internet Explorer users that puts a Google search box right into your browser. In addition, you can use it to see the "PageRank" popularity score of any page you are viewing, search within the particular site you are viewing, see a previous of "cached" copy of any dead pages, find pages similar to the one you are viewing, and more. It loads within seconds and is well worth adding to your browser. Using the toolbar with PageRank enabled sends some information back to Google. If that concerns you, choose the "Install Without Advanced Features" option. Highly-recommended.

Groowe Toolbar
http://www.groowe.com
Here's a toolbar that gives you easy access to searching Google and many other search engines, as well. With a click, you can query Yahoo, Teoma, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, MSN Search and others. In addition, it makes it easy to perform specialized searches with many of the search engines it supports. Get images back from AllTheWeb, or search only against Yahoo's human directory, or get news results back from AltaVista. It's a quick download and highly-recommended.

UltraBar
http://www.ultrabar.com/
Like Groowe, UltraBar gives you easy access to multiple search engines plus allows you to add your own. It also provides many of the features you'll find in the Google Toolbar, such as term highlighting and jumping to keyword buttons. Highly-recommended.

Alexa
http://download.alexa.com/
Alexa provides access to Google search results plus does a wonderful job of suggesting interesting sites based on the ones you are visiting -- and much more.

Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar
http://www.dqsd.net/
Like the Google Toolbar, this gives you access to Google without having to first visit the Google web site. Unlike the Google Toolbar, it has a number of other options built into it, such as the ability to query other search engines such as AllTheWeb and Teoma, as well as a range of specialty search services. This can be done using a menu-system or by special prefix codes in front of your query. The toolbar also has a built-in calculator, currency converter, translation tool and other features. This installs into your Windows taskbar, rather than into your browser. It also requires a 400K download.

Googlebar
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/
Got Netscape but you want the Google Toolbar, which is only for Internet Explorer? Then check out the volunteer-created Googlebar for Netscape.

Teoma Search Bar
http://sp.ask.com/docs/teoma/toolbar/
Provides direct access to Teoma's search results, offers search term highlighting on the pages you visit, allows access to an online dictionary and provides the ability to email any web page you view.

Oh, wow, all this stuff about bars, makes me want to head to the beach for a cool one...

 

Alexa is spyware, Groowe gives too many irrelevant findings, Ultrabar...who knows, etc. etc. etc., just Google it and forget it.

There are even more than you listed, and personally, I don't use any of them.
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Freeware/Internet/Clients/WWW/Browsers/Plug-ins/Search/

 

probably right reboot, a lot more on your DMOZ link, it's getting entirely too complicated to keep up with it all, might just as well stick my head in the sand and stay with google...

altho, if I had taken that approach way back when, I would probably still be using something like a favorites link to Altavista, or whatever I used before google toolbar...

just wondering if something better has actually come along yet, seems like with google anymore there is so much frontloading for paid "boosts ", and so many hits, takes forever to get to the meat of a search...

anybody else?

 

IMO, no ... but Teoma ain't too far behind!

 

thanks brett, and reboot:

gotta say tho, I am getting a little ticked with using google, seems like they cater more and more only to $ backed hits...

example, I just googled earlier today on BUSlink external hard drives to try to find out if they are problematic, and got 12 "pages" of 30 hits, about 360 total, all of which were commercial shopping/seller sites, nothing to do with forums/problems; conversely, did the same search on boardreader.com and found no commercialized hits and lots of info on problems/solutions...(so there's one answer huh?)

so, I guess that is why I am wondering if there is one site that has come along recently, or one toolbar that produces better results without all the $hopping stuff... yeh, I know, use parms to filter out the commercial sites, but in the example above, that would have left me with zero hits....

 

Not using a "toolbar" of any sort, I prefer to use different search engines, depending on what I'm searching for.
Usually I Google it, and then start on about page 3 or 4.
Yes, you do get a lot of irrelevant hits, but you also get more than any other engine. It just takes patience to wade through them.
Until another search engine has the database and update ability that Google has...
I can hit the same search on Altavista, Yahoo, Excite, and Google, and always find what I need in Google...not so with the others.