Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

I'm not a heavy toolbar user -- the Awesome Bar in Firefox has only reinforced my penchant for typing out URLs (I just don't need to type out the entire thing any more) and if I need a built-in search box, I'll probably use the built-in search box that, you know, is already included with my browser (after flipping it to Yahoo!, at least). Still, I can appreciate some of the awesome things that the Yahoo! Toolbar team has done with their new Toolbar, which you can read more about over at Yodel Anecdotal. A quick high-level:

• While you could always pull in Inquisitor as a standalone browser extension, it's great to have it included some of the technology by default in the Yahoo! Toolbar and exposed to the masses who might not be savvy enough to extend their browser on their own. I've noticed that it doesn't automatically preview the top results, but it'll at least keep track of sites that you've recently visited.
• PLUS, it adds in the ability to quickly port your query over to more specific search engines. Flickr and Wikipedia are enabled by default, but you can add your own shortcut as long as there's an appropriate query URL, like "http://ycoolthing.com/?s=<TERM>". You can also use this as a poor man's version of Yahoo! Shortcuts, with the added benefit that you don't need to be logged in to Yahoo! -- for instance, I've set up an SVN "search engine" to jump over to the file that I "search" for in our web SVN repository: "http://svn.blah.com/view/properties/sports/trunk/<TERM>". On top of this, you can customize the keyboard shortcut that you use to kick off your custom search engine, so it just feels pretty badass all around.
• If you use Yahoo! Bookmarks or the IE version of the toolbar, the search box will also hunt through your bookmarks and list any ones that seem relevant to your search, saving you the trouble of needing to navigate through the Bookmarks menu.
• Instead of mere buttons to link you over to random URLs, Yahoo! Toolbar has added "Apps" that you can install to instantly preview interesting information. My Sports App will tell me the scores of my favorites teams, my Mail App will expand out a little window for my inbox, my Buzz App will show me the most recent buzzy stories. It's a bit hard to tell which Apps have fancy preview windows and which just provide a dropdown menu, but the ones with the fancy preview windows are really handy.
• Of course, if you just want to get a button that links to some site that you like, you can add that in as a Custom App and choose an appopriately adorable icon.

All in all, the new Yahoo! Toolbar is packed with a ton of interesting features and has almost convinced me to leave the thing installed, which is high praise given my standard browser habits.

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