Tooling Around

Tidings and tip-offs on the ten most terrific freeware toolbars.

Most of us are so khush with Google Toolbar (www.toolbar.google.com) or Yahoo! Toolbar (www.toolbar.yahoo.com) that we tend to turn our nose up at any new developments and enhancements in the rest of the toolbar universe. Kyon bhai? Haven’t you heard the saying “Seek always, for by looking for one thing you will surely find another.”

Here’s the skinny on some the best toolbars I have encountered recently. So plunge into hitherto uncharted waters to peek at what lies beyond the horizon. (All the toolbars mentioned here are free. A few of them however tend to harvest personal info. Do check their privacy policies first.)

A-ToolBar
www.metaeureka.com
It has 50 pretty awesome tools. General tools include metasearch, web catalog, news RSS reader, spam remover, desktop search, links manager, app manager, language translator, dictionary, PIM, world clock, reminder, password keeper, weather and more. The network tools encompass telnet, ping, trace, DNS lookup, WhoIs etc. And then there are URL tools of all kinds… Ah, don’t miss the biorhythm charts and love calculator!

Advanced Searchbar
www.advancedsearchbar.com
An award winning toolbar that search over 100 search engines, over 60 news providers, and three-dozen email clients and is packed with features to ease Net trawling. It integrates with several spyware-removal proggies, blogs, and IMs. Icons allow easy access to lots of applications, including a built-in file shredder, calculator, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader, and pop-up eliminator.

Blinkx Pico
www.blinkx.com
This amazing one meg download toolbar searches over 4,000,000 hours of audio, video, podcast, vlog and TV along with conventional Web pages automatically! Instead making you trigger a search after figuring out what to search for, navigating through results etc., Pico brings you relevant results automatically using advanced algorithms to assess the info you’re viewing. Leaves me quite keywordless!

Copernic Meta
www.copernic.com/en/products/meta/index.html
This engine metasearches for images, audio, multimedia, news, auctions, and more. You can add your fav search engines and info sources to it, assign keyboard shortcuts and easily sniff around in located pages via highlighted keywords. You can search from within an application without opening your browser. It also features specialised categories like Web, Shopping, Dictionary, and Thesaurus that query multiple search engines at once. "Alt+Click"ing any word triggers start a search on it.

Furl Toolbar
www.softplatz.com/Soft/Network-Internet/Browsers-Tools/Furl-Toolbar.html
Furl is wonderfully huge online filing cabinet genie that almost metamorphoses the Internet into a personal Web by storing as much as 5 GB of your surfed pages--saved, “dog-eared” and accessible to from any PC, anywhere, anytime. You can keep Furl as a toolbar, in your bookmarks or as button. Great tool for students and researchers as apart from saving Web pages on the fly, you can also annotate and search them.

Quero Toolbar
www.quero.at
Amazingly simple and user friendly IE address bar replacement and Flash blocker for IE that enhances your Web efficiency. It lets you pick from 12 search engines. A built-in Flash and pop-up blocker kills unwanted ads. It also offers address spoofing protection, IDN and favicon support. Keyboard shortcuts, find as-you-type functionality and a built in zoom feature add to its ease of use.

jetToolBar
www.cowonamerica.com/products/jettoolbar
An uncomplicated, unobtrusive, position-anywhere, size-anyhow program launcher that also responds to voice commands. It lets you to find, administer, and launch programmes, utes, and bookmarks via tabbed app shortcut categories for easy access. Drag-and-drop functionality allows you add or annihilate buttons and categories in jiffy.

Viewpoint Toolbar
www.viewpoint.com/pub/products/toolbar.html
Viewpoint Toolbar has an interesting graphically enhanced search feature that depicts website thumbnail images in addition to text.

You store thumbnail images of bookmarked sites in a Visual Bookmarks tray. Web search aside, this is also a good photo management ute that helps you organise images from your camera and on your PC. You can also share photo albums online or e-mail pictures to people.