Here is an example of a site showing PR3 in the Google Toolbar:

This same site is not in the Google Index:

Google in their official blog writes:

First of all, in today’s Toolbar 6 launch for Internet Explorer we’re introducing the Quick Search Box (QSB) feature that provides search functionality outside of the browser. Just click on the Google logo in the taskbar to trigger it (or use the Ctrl+Space shortcut for quicker access). As you type, it will provide search and website suggestions, relevant bookmarks, and even allow you to launch applications directly from the search box. Try typing “solitaire” to see the application launcher in action. And here’s the best part: as you use the QSB, it’ll customize itself to your usage pattern, so over time you have to type fewer characters to navigate to your favorite sites and applications.

Other improvements and enhancements in Google Toolbar 6 Beta for IE including Toolbar search box now displaying high-quality website suggestions and sponsored links as users type your query, and clicking on these results will direct users directly to the website instead of opening Google search results page. Also new to Google Toolbar for IE is new tab page which replaces original IE new tab page. Google Toolbar new tab page displays most viewed sites, recently closed tabs and bookmarked pages.

Download Google Toolbar 6 Beta for IE from here.

Google Base blog recently wrote that sellers can now submit tax and shipping information for Google product search via Google Base. “We’ll soon be displaying this information on Google Product Search to provide buyers with more accurate price information, so we strongly encourage all merchants to start submitting it.”

In case you are not familiar with Google Base – it is basically a low-profile service that lets you upload structured data into Google’s Database. Google uses the data about products in Google Product Search and the real estate listings as a refinement option in Google Maps and the main search results, but I find it surprising that Google doesn’t use the data to extend the search results snippets.

A new news aggregation service called Addictomatic has been released. You can enter any topic in addictomatic such as “google” or “comic book” or everything else and it shows you a customizable instant news overview of those topics from a lot of different sources. The news bits are shown as little widget boxes and pulled from all over the web; some are pulled by APIs, but most of the news are pulled by RSS. Addictomatic – or Addict-o-matic was initially programmed by Crowd Favorite and designed by Bryan Bell.

Try the page on the topic “Google”, for instance. There will be headlines from sources like Twitter search, Google Blog search, Wikio and lots of other sources, and image and video content in the form of thumbnails shows from YouTube, Flickr, and Truveo video search.

You can easily rearrange the page elements via simple drag and drop, or you can choose to expand the Available Sources settings to opt-in to even more news sources. While not suited as a search result if you’re looking for a specific page, this approach seems potentially useful for finding random news articles (and also to find new search feeds for your research).

A couple of special news pages are also made available for the addictomatic users. The popular page for instance shows feeds like Yahoo’s most viewed photos and news stories, or content from Delicious, Digg, and Technorati.

Try it out! You will definitely like it.

Google Street View has been recently enabled for France. There used to be different panorama photos from the Tour de France route, but now there are regular pictures, from Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Marseille, Nice and Lille. Now it provided you with four zoom levels, and as usual for recent Street View imagery, Google tries to blur all the human faces and license plates to protect user’s privacy.

Other countries that have got into Google Street View are Australia, Japan and the US. Google’s camera-equipped cars are also roaming around other places in the world, so different new countries may be added gradually.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/11Fl9ZVJ7B8&hl=en&fs=1&start=15"></par am><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/11Fl9ZVJ7B8&hl=en&fs=1&start=15" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

This parameter will only work if you are trying to embed the video in your blog, but at this moment it doesn’t work for direct linking.

The Google toolbar already has a built in feature that lets you make Gmail as your default email client. But if you don’t have the google toolbar installed this is how you can do it in the latest version of Firefox.
associate “mailto” links in web pages with Gmail, so that when you click on e.g. info@seocompany.ca you’ll be instantly forwarded to create a new message in Google’s email client.

How to Activate Gmail in Firefox

Fire up Firefox, Open Tools -> Options -> Applications, and look for the entry titled “mailto”. In the dropdown box, pick Gmail. Thats all!

It seems like Google has recently removed the dictionary link in search results for at least a portion of users, or perhaps all users, In past, when you searched for a word in the dictionary – for instance “house” – there would be a link leading to a definition in the top blue bar. many years ago this was linked directly to dictionary.com and since January 2005, to answers.com. I think Answers.com will lose a lot of traffic if this feature is removed for all dictionary based words.

I’m not sure why its been removed as I personally used that feature all the time.

Update: Looks like its back up online!

If you have installed Google Chrome and want the latest releases of Google’s browser Chrome quicker than the usual official Beta updates, you can now download a special program called “channel switcher” executable from Google. Simply Run it on your Windows machine and you’ll see a dialog where you can check the Dev option and hit the Update button.

Restart your Google Chrome browser, and in the Options -> About Google Chrome dialog, click the Update button. Google explains that the Dev channel that this patch will let you test the latest fixes and get access to new features as they’re being developed. With this automatic updates coming “every 1-2 weeks” (a release notes page is also available).

Probably the only downside of this is the updates will also be less stable in comparison to the Beta release of Chrome.

Google Presentations has recently undergone a complete redesign, making it look more like recent versions of the Google Docs text editor.

If you’re new to Google Docs, watch this video to learn more about creating and collaborating on documents: