By now you have probably read that Google has released their toolbar for Firefox (in beta of course). Brad provided a heads up this was coming earlier this week and DownloadSquad has the details of the release today. It's a nicely done version of the Google Toolbar offering the expected goodies like Page Rank, form fill, spelling, and such. But what really got me as I installed it this morning was this Seinfeld reference in the End User License Agreement (EULA) you have to accept before running the toolbar.

Too funny.

Andrevan, writing at the Kuro5hin site (Slashdotted today) ponders Google's next acquisition and provides a thorough review of the company's recent run of purchases of small software companies to bolster its portfolio.

"Google is the new Internet behemoth, snatching up small companies left and right. So, in this article, I ask: what tech gems are in the running for Google's growing subsidiary menagerie? To help predict, I will first take a look at who Google has acquired in the past and what Google has done for them, and then I'll throw out a few possibilities for Googlification and discuss where they might fit into Google's strategy."

Brilliant. This is obviously a very early look at what they have in mind but Google very quietly launched a new personalized home page this afternoon. You can display your Gmail inbox, content from a number of sources including Google News (natch), NY Times, BBC, Slashdot, and Wired and stock and weather information. No RSS yet but that can't be far behind. Organizing the page is a simple drag-and-drop exercise. Take a look and see what you think.

I think Dan Gillmor nails it in his post today about Google's release of the latest version of their toolbar with a modified, but still troublesome, AutoLink feature:

"The alterations (created by Autolink) aren't that big a deal, not today. But it's inevitable that they will grow. This is too powerful a tool not to be used in more expansive ways. Google still offers me value. But so do the alternatives, and I'm increasingly seeking those out."

I'm not sure why Google is being so sly about the latest Gmail feature. As of yesterday I am able to set a preference on a per-mailer basis to always display images from a particular sender. This works very much the same way it does in Outlook and is really welcome. You still can display images one message at a a time as you prefer, but it's nice to be able to have e-mail from trusted sources just open up with full formatting.

Now, if they'd just add that Move to Trash button…

Buzz and Scoble have been playing liar's poker with Google and MSN Search, comparing how many links each of their names returns. According to Google, Scoble is approaching half a million links, Buzz a impressive but much smaller 24,000. Me? A paltry 6,370. ;^)

The same exercise on MSN Search yields the following results: Scoble (71,260),  Buzz (4,100), me (4,836). For grins, I'm adding Yahoo! to the mix: Scoble (843,000), Buzz (29,100), me (24,400).

Now you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on here. I'm sure some of the real search engine rocket scientists can provide completely factual and incomprehensible explanations but to me the answer is obvious. Someone's not telling it like it really is. And, if you ask me, it's Google and Yahoo! The easiest explanation (which, according to a guy named Occaam and his favorite personal grooming tool is the one you probably want to go with) is that Google and Yahoo! have a lot of duplicate listings.

Even on the truncated set of listings any of these engines display, there are a ton of dupes. So, is there an absolute number? I don't think so - at least not one you or I can get our hands on today. But my healthy sense of proportion suggests to me that the lowest number is probably the most accurate, especially when I look at other measures like Technorati, PubSub, and Feedster. Drop a comment if you want to try to explain how three engines using similar crawler technology and similar algorithms can be this far apart. Or even if you want to make wild conjecture (since that's probably going to sound just as plausible).

Big day in the analytics world - NetIQ spins out WebTrends and then Google announces it is acquiring Urchin. Eric Peterson of Jupiter Research has details on the NetIQ move here. Pretty much everyone has the same press release facts about Google and Urchin. Ultimately, I find the Urchin acquisition more interesting, in large part because I think it has the potential to make web analytics approachable to many small website and blog operators who've relied on pretty primitive tools (by comparison) to date.

I have a commercial license for Urchin that I use to track activity and perform analytics on my company's website. We've used it for years and it has evolved in that time into a very powerful tool. Recently, the company moved into the hosted service space with the release of Urchin 6 On Demand bringing down the price point by removing the need for your own dedicated hardware (and providing more of a head-on challenge to the WebTrends hosted option).

It will be most interesting to see how Google ends up using this latest acquisition. Peterson offers three scenarios in a post on his blog calling one of them "truly terrifying".

David Weinberger, his claims to the contrary, does an excellent bit of crystal-ball gazing wondering what a Google browser might actually look like. Not only is it a very realistic prognostication (given all of Google's recent acquisitions and releases), it introduces a new term into the lexicon: world browser.

While Google says that Internet Explorer is required to use the new Google Desktop Search, intrepid developers have released the Firefox Toolbar that extends the Desktop Search to the Firefox browser on Windows and the Google Toolbar to Firefox on the Mac. This new toolbar allows one-click access to Gmail and the ability to search your Gmail account.

Adding Google Desktop Search to the toolbar in Windows requires an easy "hack" but it is one Google themselves provide to add Google Desktop Search to their own Deskbar. I've hacked my Google Deskbar and it works fine.

The Firefox Toolbar works with Firefox 0.9 and the PR1 release.

NOTE: This post has been updated. I originally indicated (incorrectly) that this toolbar enabled Google Desktop Search on the Mac. As a reader pointed out in the comments to this post, Google Desktop Search requires an .exe file that is currently only available for Windows 2000 and XP. Sorry for the error.

Google has released a public beta of their long-awaited desktop search tool (code-named Puffin) at Digital Life today. Search Engine Lowdown has a very thorough review already posted so rather than duplicating their fine work, I will work with the beta for a short while and share some impressions.

A couple of immediate thoughts:

• I'm disappointed that Gmail is not supported in this first release

• I'm even more disappointed that there is no image search, especially for Picasa users

• The speed (so far - I'm still indexing) is just what you would expect from a Google search tool - which is to say instantaneous

• You can combine desktop and web search results or keep them separate

• The privacy policy is crystal clear

Just read an interesting brief at E-Commerce News that suggests industry analysts see Gmail surpassing the AdSense vehicle as a revenue generator for Google. The premise is that the ads in Gmail are even more carefully targeted.

...analysts predict Google will have greater earnings from Gmail ads than from its search engine ads since they are more direct and concentrated.

The article discusses Microsoft and Yahoo responses to Gmail and once again raises the prospect of a Google-branded browser or IM client.

I've written a number of reviews of personal search tools. Let's face it - search in Windows and Office (especially Outlook where I find myself searching most often) is broken. The greater your store of files, the less likely it becomes you can find what you're looking for. This has created a thriving third-party niche to address the problem.

Threee of my favorite tools are:

• Lookout - an add-in for Outlook that can find any e-mail or other Outlook object in seconds

• FileHand - a system level search tool that displays Google-like relevance ranking and text extracts in the search results

• x1 - another system level search tool with a unique filter-as-you-type display

Yesterday, the New York Times (registration required) reported that Google has a forthcoming product, code-named Puffin, that will do for the desktop what their search engine has done for the web. With the delays in the release of Longhorn, does Google have an opportunity to head Microsoft off at the pass by staking out the desktop as its turf for search? Could be…