Google's latest Toolbar (Verson 4) has a new feature that is sure to be popular with people who are interested in making the most of their toolbar real estate: custom buttons. (Check your toolbar version under Settings > Help > About Google Toolbar. This function currently works only on Internet Explorer versions of the toolbar.)

Create custom buttons that link directly to your favorite sites! Okay, that alone isn't particularly exciting since you could do that using a bookmarks toolbar, so here's where it gets more interesting. You can add functionality to the buttons, such as RSS feed syndication*, create custom searches, and pass data from the page you're visiting to the search site of your choice.

Custom Searches: If you find yourself running searches on search engines other than Google on a regular basis, why not add that search site to your toolbar for fast access to that site? This allows you to type your query into the Google Toolbar search box, then head directly to the results page on the site of your choice. Here is a screen shot of my search options as of this writing:



This can be used two ways: type a search into the text field, then click the icon to select the appropriate icon for the search, or change your default search engine by clicking the icon to the left of the search box. The icon next to the search box identifies which search site you'll query when you hit the enter key or Go button.

Feed Subscription Buttons: Google Toolbar provides a new way to subscribe to a blog. By adding a blog's custom button to your Google Toolbar, you can easily scan the latest headlines from the blog of your choice from the toolbar. Here is an example for Technology Evangelist:



Clicking the down arrow next to the Technology Evangelist icon displays a drop-down menu of the latest headlines from this site. Clicking a headline takes you directly to that post. Clicking the icon takes you to this site's homepage. By the way, the icon to the right of Technology Evangelist is the above screen shot comes from Niall Kenney's blog.

Searching Within Sites

Taking another look at the first screen shot, notice that Technology Evangelist and Niall Kennedy's blog both appear among the searches in the drop-down:



Buttons can be set up to query against a site's search engine. If you suddenly find yourself in need of something you previously read on Technology Evangelist, just search our site's content from your toolbar. More likely uses of custom searches are queries of comparison shopping sites like Pricegrabber, large reference sites like Wikipedia, and specialty search engines like Technorati.

Give our button a try

As of this writing, if you're using Internet Explorer and have version 4 or higher of the Google Toolbar installed, adding the Technology Evangelist custom button is as simple as clicking on this link. You can always delete our button at a later date under Settings > Options > Buttons on the Google Toolbar. Let us know what you think.

If you've used custom buttons, have you found them useful? If yes, what have you liked about them? If not, why not?

What kind of custom button would you like to have that doesn't exist today?

*Yes, you can do this in Firefox using Live Bookmarks.