Google Hacks, 2nd Edition

Add Google to Your Toolbar or Desktop

Google from wherever you are without skipping a beat, thanks to an assortment of browser search boxes, toolbars, and desktop applications.

Just because Google is a web site doesn’t mean that you have to deal with it as such. Picture this: you’re in the zone, working on that big project, browser windows, spreadsheets, and slides littering your desktop—both figuratively and literally. At some point you need to check a fact, find a statistic, or read a news story. Now, you could open yet another browser window, type google.com, and search the Web, but that’s about two steps too many and (done repeatedly) may well disrupt your flow.

Take, for instance, what happened in the midst of writing this hack. Up popped an instant message from a friend with a patent number that he’d stumbled across and that he thought I might find interesting. I could have opened another browser window, browsed to http://www.google.com, Googled for "us patent database“, and searched for that particular patent. Instead, I pasted that number into the Google Search box built right into my Firefox web browser (shown in Figure 5-3), prefixed it with patent, hit Return, and clicked the quick link to the patent at the U.S. Patent Database ["Quick Links: Google by Numbers” in Chapter 1]. This sort of flow, despite saving only a step or two at most, is so catchy that it has become an integral part of my workflow.

Figure 5-3. The Firefox built-in search box expands to talk to just about ...