Toolbar Tips and Tricks

Since Yahoo! Search is the most commonly used feature on the Yahoo! Toolbar, I thought it would be helpful to share a handful of search-based productivity hacks our toolbar team uses to help squeeze a little more juice out of the toolbar’s search box:

Yahoo! Toolbar for IE:

• When using IE, press Alt-S to put the cursor directly into the Yahoo! Toolbar search box.
• Once the cursor is in the search box, you can use the arrow keys to traverse the buttons and menus.
• Right-click any button or menu to open its link automatically in a new window (instead of in the current browser window).
• With Smart Tools enabled (Toolbar Options under Settings menu), you can select text on the web page, by tabbing over the desired content. A little Y! icon appears to help you easily search the web, look up in the dictionary and translate, in addition to other options as well.
• Right-click on a web page to easily Bookmark it or send it to a friend.

Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox:

• Search Suggest: As you type in Yahoo! Toolbar, you will see suggestions of other common searches.
• Yahoo! menu: Yahoo! Toolbar puts a Yahoo! menu in the Firefox browser that duplicates all the links from the Toolbar (enabled in Toolbar Options under Settings menu). This is primarily to provide access to people with special computing needs, so that they can get to all the links on their Yahoo! Toolbar should they not be able to use a mouse or other device to point on the toolbar. But it’s also an additional convenient way for anyone to get to their favorite links.

Yahoo! Toolbar, both IE and Firefox:

• In newer versions, you can click and grab the little arrows near the right of the search box to drag and change the search box width.
• All Search Shortcuts work from Yahoo! Toolbar search box (i.e. Local Weather: [city] weather)
• Translate button: Under the Add/Edit buttons from the Settings menu, you can add a Translate button. This button will translate web pages to English, and has menu links to Babel Fish to translate words and bodies of text too.

Try ‘em out and let me know what you think in the comments.

Duke Fan
Yahoo! Toolbar Team