The Google Deskbar is yet another marvellous pice of work, in the making in the Google Labs. The Labs showcase ideas that are still in the budding stage, and yet to be completely developed. But there are several brilliant technologies being created there! Have a look, there's plenty to play around with...

My favourite out of these was the Google Deskbar, which enables you to run a search without having to open your browser. It sits at the bottom of your screen in the taskbar in the background, when not in use.

I believe that it requires IE to be installed in order to run, but am not sure on this issue.

It is still in its 'beta stage' which means that it hasn't yet been fully developed, and can be downloaded here.

It looks a useful Windows enhancement. It would be quite handy to just type a word into the search bar while using the Word Processor, or any other application, without bothering to manually open the browser. It would add just a bit more automation to things I suppose.

I'll probably wait until I go over to XP before considering using it. This is because it would probably add to programs that run in the background all the time. Windows 98SE benefits from keeping those to a minimum because of the 'resources' limitation it has.

I had a read of their forum and it noticed a report saying that the Google Deskbar works well with Netscape 7.1, so it appears that it would run with any browser set as default.

EDITED to add: but maybe it still uses IE rather than the default browser for its display.

Thanks for highlighting it.

I have had no trouble with the Google deskbar in a year. I don't know what I'd do without it. Marvellous.

More than Google Deskbar, I have always loved Google Compute. It devotes your computer's idle time to scientific research. I've always loved it.