Google Deskbar

~ the obit ~

Google Deskbar turned up in November 2003 as a Google Labs download for Windows, and the idea behind it was small enough to explain in one line. Your browser was a heavy thing to start just to look up a word. So Google put the search box somewhere the browser was not, down in the taskbar, next to the clock.

The press noticed immediately that this was Google planting a flag on Microsoft's desktop rather than inside Microsoft's browser, where the Toolbar already lived. John Battelle wrote it up as a challenge to Windows. He was reading it correctly, roughly a year before anyone outside Google knew what Desktop Search was going to be.

It was a Labs product and it was treated like one. There was no support line and no second version worth the name. Google shipped it, watched what people did with it, and then built the thing it actually wanted.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

Control, alt and G put the cursor in the box from anywhere in Windows. You typed, and results opened in what Google called a mini-viewer, a small floating window that dismissed itself the moment your mouse wandered off it. Shift and F1 brought it back if you dismissed it by accident. An arrow in the corner promoted the whole thing into a real browser window if the answer turned out to need one.

That dismiss-on-blur behavior is the part worth remembering. Everything on a 2003 desktop that opened wanted to stay open. Deskbar's window assumed you wanted it gone, which is now how every quick-search overlay on every operating system behaves.

~ the plugin crowd ~

Google published an API for it in 2004 and a small scene formed around a site called GDeskbar. People wrote plugins to search their Gmail from the taskbar and to fire off a Net Send message without touching a window. None of it was sanctioned beyond the API itself, and most of it ran on someone's spare-time hosting.

The API went away with the product. Google Desktop arrived with its own plugin model and its own gadget scene, and none of the Deskbar work carried across to it.

~ the assumption underneath ~

Deskbar only made sense if your connection was already up. No browser means no dial sequence, no handshake, no waiting, which is a lovely proposition if the line is permanent and a joke if it is not. In 2003 I was on dial-up at home in Turkey, and TTNet broadband did not arrive for me until around 2006. The browser was never the expensive part of looking something up. The connection was.

So by the time I had the kind of line this product assumed, Google had already written it off.

~ what took its place ~

Google Desktop, which shipped its first beta in October 2004 and grew a sidebar plus an indexer that went through your whole drive. By 2006 it did everything Deskbar did and a great deal more, and it was the product Google was actually promoting.

On 8 May 2006 Google Operating System ran a piece noting that Deskbar was no longer supported by Google but could still be downloaded from PC World's file archive. That is the closest thing to a death notice it ever got. No announcement, no shutdown post, just a blogger pointing out that the official download had quietly become somebody else's mirror.

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