From the official Google Blog we find the post All buttoned up which informs us that
As the Google Toolbar has gotten
more popular, the greatest source of ideas about new features has come from our
users. The breadth and variety of these requests is so large that it's hard to
satisfy everyone. But then we started noticing engineers on the team had cool
hacks on their Toolbars for doing customized searches on our internal bugs
database, corporate employee directory, etc... We were barely done asking
ourselves whether it was possible to offer this capability in the new Google Toolbar beta when one of the
engineers started designing a feature called Custom Buttons. Here are some of
the coolest aspects of Custom Buttons and why I think they're a big
deal:
1) Simple
API: The term API is almost a misnomer -- it literally takes seconds to make
one of these. I just can't resist the urge to make a new one every time I run
into new website. A couple of simple steps and voila - a new button's sitting on
your Toolbar (check out the Getting
Started Guide).
2) Flexibility: The simple inclusion of RSS &
Atom feeds (and particularly allowing the update of toolbar button icons through
feeds) has allowed for buttons like a weather button and a mood ring
button.
3) Accessibility: Most users don't even need to make buttons. It
takes one click on our buttons gallery or on a website that offers them to
install a button for your favorite sites. And the custom buttons we built to
search our intranet showed us how valuable a customizable toolbar can be to
organizations, so now there's an enterprise version of
Google Toolbar that can be securely deployed across a company.
I use the Google toolbar quite frequently when performing searches
and one of my biggest gripes is that it doesn't give me the option of
using Google Music Search
for my searches. So when I found out about the new version of the
toolbar, I downloaded it out and clicked on "Add Search Type" which
took me to the Google Toolbar Button Gallery. Guess what? There's no option for adding Google Music Search to my list of default search types.
So I tried reading the documentation on Getting Started with the Google Toolbar API
so I could figure out how to add it myself and came up short. The
entire API seems to assume that some stuff gets installed in my
right-click menu in Internet Explorer which doesn't seem to be the
case. I wonder if I need to reboot to get the changes to show up? Bah.
Now I feel irritated that I just wasted 15 minutes of my time on
this.