The three search giants – Yahoo!, Windows Live Search (formally known as MSN), Google – have all, over the last few years, released their browser toolbars. They differ from one another considerably, so when reading my comparison, bear in mind the features that will be most appropriate to your needs.

Of course, now that Firefox, Internet Explorer and most other leading browsers have a built-in search bar, it's not going to be this feature on its own that will turn heads. Apart from anything else, a toolbar search bar is going to force you to use its affiliated search engine, rather than your specified favourite.

The Yahoo! Toolbar

The Yahoo! toolbar is specifically aimed at members of the Yahoo! community (i.e. those with a Yahoo! ID for email, messenger or other services). This community orientation is very useful if you are a Yahoo! user – you can log in to your account, and the toolbar will give you one-click access to your webmail and other secure features.

As you type in the toolbar search box, a dropdown list appears, allowing you to search the web, Flickr, images, audio, news and so on. Search terms can be highlighted (but unfortunately only in one colour, however many search terms you use).

There are many one-click buttons on the Yahoo! toolbar which take you straight to a Yahoo! service, such as a Norton Anti-Virus scan, Yahoo! games, and Briefcase. The Yahoo! toolbar can store your bookmarks online, but you can only manually add bookmarks – it can't import your bookmarks from your browser to the online service. This toolbar is very useful if you're an active Yahoo! user in general, because most of its buttons and tools are Yahoo!-related. The toolbar would benefit from some more general-use features.

Windows Live Toolbar

Again, Windows Live Toolbar offers a dropdown list as soon as you start typing your search terms, asking whether you'd like to search RSS feeds, Encarta, news, local sites and more, and also suggesting popular search terms. Past searches are stored, so it's easy to find the same pages again. A nice feature is that search terms are highlighted in different colours on the page.

The local search is especially useful: it provides contact details and maps for local businesses. The SmartMenu feature could be useful or annoying, depending on preference – when you highlight some text on a page, tiny menus pop up with weather forecasts, stock market information, maps and so on. The News button takes you straight to the BBC News site, and a dropdown shows you the latest stories. The Favourites button stores your bookmarks online and synchronises your bookmarks with browsers on other computers you use.

There's also a button for Windows Live Spaces (the Microsoft online community site), one for Windows Live Mail, and one for Windows Live OneCare, which can scan your computer for adware, spyware and viruses – free, but only for 90 days. There are also lots of extra buttons you can add if you so desire.

Frustratingly, even though Windows Live Toolbar was developed by Microsoft, it still duplicates the search bar on IE7. IE7 or Windows Live Toolbar should really give you the option of disabling the IE7 search bar. Also, the toolbar isn't available for Firefox.

The Google Toolbar

Google released their toolbar first, and in my opinion, it's still the best. One of the nicest things about it is that it feels like a generic tool rather than a proprietary one; even though there are buttons for Google-specific services, there are also lots of useful general features that are not specifically Google-related. One example is the wonderfully useful form-filling button: you tell the toolbar your details once, and from then on, when you arrive at a page with a form on it, you can just click the form-fill button and it fills in the details for you.

Another great feature is that not only does it highlight search terms (in different colours), but when you click a link, the search terms continue to be highlighted. Also, like in Windows Live Toolbar, the search box includes a term-guessing feature. You can choose to search the web or just the site you're on.

Google's toolbar is probably the most customisable of the three. There are several buttons you can add to Google services, including Google Video and Google Mail. But there is also an ever-growing list of handy user-created buttons available in an online gallery. Lots of SEO and developers' tools are available. One of these that's included when you install the toolbar is the PageRank button, which shows you the ranking of the page you're on, and other pages that link to it.

Even the Google toolbar isn't perfect. It'd be handy if it had the option to run onto two lines, because there are so many useful buttons that you may find yourself running out of space. Also, at the moment, the spellchecker that comes with the toolbar doesn't allow you to choose between American and British English – it just uses both – so it won't pick up on a British person accidentally typing "humor". In a similar vein, there are some features, such as the feature which finds an address on a page and then shows the location on a map, which is only available for US locations. But knowing Google, they're working on improving this as we speak.

By Helena Henderson

For more information on features of a domain name, pricing of domains, or domain registration questions please feel free to contact Domainmonster.com support team who will be happy to assist you.