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Monday, July 14, 2003
Which Toolbar Do You Use?
Over the past few weeks, a gaggle of "toolbar" rollouts have taken the Internet world by storm. Well, OK, not by storm, exactly. But I'm sure if you went to Google News and looked for "toolbar," you'd see all the recent announcements.
Or would you? The first bazillion or so results on a news search for "toolbar" are for the latest iteration of the Google Toolbar. Some might think that's biased, but on second thought, that probably mirrors the overall pattern of toolbar installations in the populace.
Even early toolbar adopters get sick of trying out toolbars. In fact the first episodes of "toolbar fatigue" were being felt 18+ months ago. Remember when you couldn't decide between the Yahoo toolbar and the Alexa toolbar (and one or two others I'm forgetting)? So you deep-sixed Yahoo? Then later on, when the Google Toolbar (undoubtedly the most widely-used toolbar out there today, though I haven't seen any metrics on this) came along, it was see you later Alexa. My relationship with Alexa has definitely been on-again, off-again at the best of times. When given the opportunity to view PageRank, I decided that was better than "Alexa rank," so I stuck with Google.
In that cluttered, Google-dominated context, it seemed more than a bit strange that Dogpile and Hotbot went to great efforts to publicize their recently-released toolbars. There are only so many rungs on that ladder (limited mindshare). And only so much space on the user's browser (limited "screenshare").
So what toolbar do you use? Do you use multiple toolbars? Drop us a line and let us know.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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D'oh!
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