• February 17, 2005

Google Wednesday released a beta version of a new version of its toolbar software, which allows users to search Google via a toolbar item embedded in the browser window, and incorporates a pop-up blocker.

In addition to these older features, this new release incorporates a spellchecker, the option to highlight search terms on a page, an "autolink" feature that turns street addresses into online maps, and a function to translate English words into other languages. Other search engines recently have released new toolbar software as well. Yahoo! debuted its Firefox beta toolbar last Wednesday, and A9 also offers a toolbar for Firefox.

--Shankar Gupta