Yahoo! News - Google Toolbar Can Browse By Name

Yahoo! News - Google Toolbar Can Browse By Name Google Toolbar's new Browse by Name feature, introduced on July 14, takes the concept of searching from the browser Address Bar and kicks it up a notch. All you do is type the name or description of the site you're looking for. If there's a strong match, Google will go straight to that page. For example, "new york times", "ben and jerry", "john kerry" and "strong bad" all zoom directly to the appropriate page. When there's no single obvious match, you haven't lost anything –- you still get a standard Google search results page. The functionality may remind some of the RealNames service (which shut down in 2002). Web sites could pay to register a simple phrase with RealNames as an alternative point of access for their URL. However, sites need not and cannot register for Browse by Name. If a page's relevance to the search phrase is significantly higher than all others, it will be selected. The process is dynamic –- if at a later time a different site's relevance skyrockets, then that site will be selected. There's no connection with Supported Links or AdWords, and sites cannot pay for placement in Browse by Name.


Current Google Toolbar users will be updated automatically over the next few weeks. Those who have already configured Google as their default search engine will have Browse by Name turned on by default. Others can enable it from the Options dialog. If you don't want to wait for the automated update, just download the toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com. Note that during installation you must choose whether or not to allow the toolbar to send non-personal information about the sites you visit back to Google –- if you choose otherwise, you can't get PageRank data in the toolbar. However, you need not enable advanced features to use Browse by Name.