The add-on toolbars do more than just save you the hassle of going to the search engine's website. They have other features, including popup blockers, ad blockers, antispyware, live links to breaking news, dictionary and phonebook searches, and more.

Some critics have raised concerns about privacy, particularly if you enable the Alexa page ranking options (which shows you the popularity of a particular web page.) However, Google and other toolbar makers assure us that no personal data is collected from our computers.

Most toolbars are designed for the latest version of Windows Internet Explorer. They may not work with earlier versions.

You can download as many toolbars as you like, but the more you display at the top of your browser window, the more cluttered it is, and the less space you have for reading actual web-page content. You can enable and disable individual toolbars under the View menu of Internet Explorer. Here are some links to browser-specific toolbars:

• Google Toolbar
• Yahoo! Companion (also available for Firefox browser)
• MSN Toolbar
• Dogpile Toolbar
• Vivisimo Toolbar
• AskJeeves Search Bar
• Teoma Search Bar
• Advanced Search Bar From this toolbar you can search up to 90 different search engines.
• The Answers.com toolbar puts dozens of reference materials at your fingertips. You can also search any topic in Answers, and get results from multiple reference sources.

Here are two search tools that install right on your Windows task bar (at the bottom of your screen) so that you don't even need to have your browser open to start searching:

• The HotBot Desk Bar launches the HotBot search engine, which uses Google and AskJeeves technology.
• Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar This launches Google by default, but also has options for Yahoo! and specialized search engines.

If you are using a browser other than IE, not to worry. There are many comparable toolbars and other add-ons. One of the most popular is the Googlebar for Mozilla, Netscape and Firefox, which looks and functions much like the Google toolbar for IE. Safari for Mac has a Google search window built in to the browser's main toolbar.

The A9 Toolbar from Amazon is available for IE, Firefox and Netscape. In addition to the functions of other toolars, A9 allows you to store bookmarks online and to store notes on any web page, which you can later access when you next visit that page.

Answers.com (see above) has a plugin for Firefox.

Firefox offers many different "extensions" that you download separately to customize your browser with functions that are most useful to you. For example, there is an ad blocker, a bandwidth tester, cookie manager, image zoom, instant dictionary lookup, and dozens of others. To download extensions, click on Extensions under the Tools menu of the Firefox browser.

Bookmarklets

Bookmarklets are little shortcuts that you can place on the links bar at the top of your browser window (or in a bookmarks or Favorites folder.) They are a few lines of javascript code that perform various tasks including switching search engines, viewing cookies, enlarging images, changing text styles and more. Here are some useful bookmarklets: