Archived from the original (Interview, webcast) on September 21, 2012. ^ "Futures in Biotech 27: at 1.3 Petaflops".^ Shankland, Stephen (March 22, 2002).^ Is Google too powerful? by Bill Thompson, BBC News,.^ "Does Wesley's Google Toolbar Invade Your Privacy? Not Really…".^ Google's new toolbar: Now more evil than ever.^ "How do webmasters opt out of sidewiki?".Archived from the original on December 19, 2011. ^ "Chrome Web Store - Google Sidewiki".^ "Help and learn from others as you browse the web: Google Sidewiki".^ "Install Google Toolbar - Toolbar Help"."Take one last look at Google Toolbar, which is now dead". ^ "Google Launches The Google Toolbar".The program ended in October 2005 in favor of the project's official clients, and is no longer available for the Toolbar. Although it was limited in functionality and scope, it increased participation from 10,000 up to about 30,000 active CPUs. Functionally, it downloaded a small packet of work, performed calculations on it, and uploaded it back to Stanford University. It was founded in March 2002 by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Google Compute was a separately downloadable add-on for the Google Toolbar which utilized the user's computer to help the distributed computing project, which studies disease-relevant protein folding and other molecular dynamics. It does track "anonymous" statistics, which can reveal a lot of information when correlated with other data, although similar criticisms could be made of Google's online search engine. The toolbar does not track personally identifiable surfing activities of the end user unless advanced features such as PageRank are specifically enabled by the user. Google Watch has raised concerns about Google Toolbar's possible threats to privacy, such as tracking of browsing patterns, automatic installation of updates without the user's knowledge, and a privacy policy that can be revised without notice. This feature does not exist for the mobile version. The desktop version of Google Toolbar shows the cached copy of any given search result, which was useful for slower Internet connections and benefitted by Google Web Accelerator until its discontinuation in 2008. Google said that the feature "adds useful links" and "none of the companies which received AutoLinks had paid for the service." For example, if it finds a book's ISBN on a webpage, it provides a link to Amazon's product page for the particular book. Google Toolbar was criticized when the AutoLink feature was added to the toolbar because this new feature directed users to pre-selected commercial websites. Google Toolbar can also provide the geolocation data to third-party websites through the W3C Geolocation API. This location was used to optimize search results based on where the user was located. My Location was a geolocation service which uses the location of Wi-Fi access points to determine the toolbar user's location. In September 2011, Google announced that it would discontinue Sidewiki. Web site owners could not control Sidewiki comments, and there was no way for a web site to opt out of Sidewiki however, Sidewiki was disabled on secure sites. Sidewiki is currently available for Internet Explorer and Firefox through Google Toolbar, the Google Chrome browser through an add-on, and for other browsers, like Safari, it was available as a bookmarklet.
Google uses ranking algorithms to determine comment relevancy and usefulness using criteria such as users voting up and down a comment and past contributions. Google Sidewiki was launched on September 23, 2009, allowing users to make comments, which are visible to the public, on any web page. Google Toolbar is often distributed through product bundling with a primary download. It has tools such as AutoLink, AutoFill, Translation, spell checker common to all browsers, while pop-up blocker and word finder are restricted to Internet Explorer. Users can log into their Gmail accounts and access their email, saved bookmarks, and web history.
Google Toolbar resides above the browser's tab bar and provides a search box to carry out web searches.