Mountain View, California — Search engine behemoth Google Inc. has been earnestly keeping its Labs team on their toes and has released a new lab to its series of feature-generating experimental workshops, the company just last week, announced the launch of Toolbar Labs, an experimental new features — including the first two Lab candidates with “My Location” features identical to those oh-so-creepy Google Latitude services unveiled in February and the Simplified Chinese Toolbar.
This new feature for desktop browsers that automatically makes them location aware.
The move is the latest demonstration of Google’s ongoing mission to add location-based services — and it is the second in a week after the relaunch of Google Labs — of the company’s beta-testing philosophy.
Google has a multi-faceted labs to create new and interesting features for its products. Perhaps the one with the most visibility is Gmail Labs. The folks over there are continuously builds new and interesting beta features for Gmail. Now the Google Toolbar gets its own lab. Google says the, “Google Toolbar Labs is a way for us to get new ideas out to you quickly so we can see if you like them.” It cautions that most labs are pre-beta software, and may not be entirely stable. In other words, proceed at your own risk.
Google’s My Location feature is an attempt to simplify the Toolbar’s Maps function. In the Toolbar, Google Maps centers on the user’s current location using nearby WiFi access points. Typing a query like “Thai food” into the bar will find the closest restaurant to your location.
For the time being, the feature is only available in the U.S.
“A few things to noted as you check out Toolbar Labs: It is a forum to test out new ideas, so some of these ideas will make it into the standard Toolbar, but others may not. Also, labs versions are not as well-tested as beta versions, so they may be slightly more unstable,” toolbar team members Aseem Sood and Susan Taing said in a blog post.
The company uses labs experiments to launch products rapidly even if they are partially cooked, to get early feedback on products it needs to steer in the right direction, and to draw attention to its technology.
The updated Google Toolbar, available for download now, is an addition of Google’s Labs services, bringing ongoing updates, enhancements and nifty add-ons just like it does for Gmail. The new toolbars must be downloaded and installed, and currently only works with Internet Explorer 6.0+. Although toolbars take up valuable screen real estate, they are important as a way for companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google to drive traffic to their search engines and encourage use of other online services.
Google Simplified Chinese Toolbar
The second, Toolbar’s China-based team developed Google Simplified Chinese Toolbar, is a revamped version of the application tailored to use the small slice of real estate more effectively for the language and has built-in translation features with a single click.
We recognize that due to differences in local language structures, users who speak other languages may have specific needs for browsing the web. To address this, our team in China developed a slightly different Toolbar concept called the Google Simplified Chinese Toolbar (Google工具栏简体中文版).
This toolbar is only available in Simplified Chinese.