New Google Toolbar Brings Browse By Name

Philipp Lenssen writes "The newest release of the Google Toolbar (Internet Explorer only) comes with a Browse by Name feature. It lets you enter keywords in the browser address bar, and when Google decides this is a sure bet you will be directly forwarded to the right page. Is this the return of Internet Keywords?"

Comments

Poor submission

[Anonymous Coward]

http://toolbar.google.com/bbn_help.html for (a little) more info

Re:Return of Internet Keywords?

[Ender Ryan]

There have been several attempts by several different parties to introduce an AOL-ish "Keyword" system to the general web-browsing population. I am not sure which the submitter is referring to, possibly something MS once tried to do with IE? I think I recall MS fumbling around with something like that some years ago. I don't know...

Re:lucky

[trauma]

I downloaded this thing about a week ago after a format, and without having performed any rigorous testing my impression is that it takes me directly to a page *only* if the URL comprises my search terms. So it's much more selective than "i'm feeling lucky".

To take a (random) example, typing "harman kardon" takes me to harmankardon.com. However, typing "harman kardon amplifiers" takes me to a standard search results page. Same thing with "mazda" vs "mazda trucks".

So IMHO it ends up being a rather benign little time-saver.

Re:Appears to work well

[Choron]

Keywords are enabled by default in Firefox but you can easily disable them.

- Type about:config in the URL field
- Look for the keyword.enabled line and double-click it
- Replace "True" with "False"

Et voila !

Re:You mean...

[terranlune]

You could actually do this in IE as well by merging the values below into the registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl]
"provider"=""

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g]
@="http://www.google.com/se arch?q=%s&btnG=Google+S earch"
" "="+"
"#"="%23"
"&"="%26"
"?"="%3F"
"+"="%2B"
"="="%3D"

I've been using this built-in support in both browsers for years...

RealNames information

[callipygian-showsyst]

For those of you that don't remember the abomination that was RealNames, here's a story about their last business day

Back when Real Names was a business, I was working for a Movie Studio. The Real Names folks almost sounded threatening when they told us that we'd better snatch up our names before someone else did! Thankfully we just ignored them.

Old news, Mozilla/Netscape7 have bookmark keywords

[fcassia_at_gmail]

Old news. Mozilla and Netscape 7.x both feature "Bookmark Keywords"... one of the hidden gems of Mozilla Browser Suite.

1. Go to your favorite web page (say www.nytimes.com).
2. Bookmark it (CTRL-D)
3. Go to the Bookmarks Manager (CTRL-B)
4. Scroll down to the entry you just added and press CTRL-I to edit it.
5. On the dialog that appears, there's a "Keyword" entry field, enter the "keyword" that you want to use for this web page you have bookmarked (example: nyt).
6. That's it!. Next time you enter "NYT" (unquoted of course) on the url entry field and press [enter] you're taken to www.nytimes.com
7. repeat for every web page that you want to create your personal keyword.

Some other suggestions:
1. Drop Internet Explorer and MS-Lookout! ^R^R^R^R^R^R Outlook.

2. Install Mozilla as your primary browser and e-mail client.

3. set your IE proxy to some non-existant internal IP address (10.x.x.x), on the exceptions list, put the windowsupdate page (makes it impossible for IE to reach out any page on the net, except windowsupdate).

FC

Re:You mean...

[km790816]

Even easier: http://www.google.com/google.reg

Save it and double-click to add it to the registy.