Last modified: 2009-04-17 02:45:45 UTC
Google Toolbar 4.0 is currently in beta, and will eventually be released. I am not sure, but I believe Google uses a push mechanism to silently push an upgrade out to all Google Toolbar users when a new version comes out. It would provide us with many new users if we had a Google Toolbar button - who knows, we might become a button included by default with the toolbar - but we don't have a Google Toolbar button. See http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/gallery . They're easy to create, see http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/apis/started.html and http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/apis/howto_guide.html . We should also add a drop-down RSS feed; many Google toolbar buttons have one. I suggest "Did you know?" because it changes much more often than the front-page featured article yet shows pretty high quality articles on average. Therefore, I am marking this as depending on bug 4818, "RSS feed for [[Template:Did you know]]".
Created attachment 1382 [details] Wikipedia search button for Google Toolbar BlinkBits's "Wikifeeds" feature seems to have appeared. They provide this feature already. See http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/gallery?keyword=Reference and scroll down to Wikifeeds. Their i18n isn't bad. While the button is being installed you are asked: "Enter a two-letter language code. English - en, Spanish - es, German - de, [snip]" But the actual search results are pretty bad. They provide full-text search, which is good. But they only let you see a "preview" version of the article, which means that all internal links have been removed. I have come up with a button we can use with no featured-articles RSS feed behind it (attached). Why don't we use that for now? That way we'll have a head start on staying at the top of the "Most Popular Buttons" list. (The sooner we make that list, the more popular our button will be, and the higher on the list we'll end up being.)
(To submit the button to Google, all we have to do is host the XML file on one of our servers and then fill in the http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/request.py?contact_type=button form.)
Someone has already kindly created a Wikipedia button, which you can find from http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/gallery but it seems it is only accessible if you search for it. It is not visible from the "Reference" button category. As well, it is not marked as "official" so even if it were categorized it would be right at the bottom of the list. We should make a button marked we claim as "official" (I assume doesn't have to be official, there just has to be a copy of it up at Bugzilla, that's all) with an RSS feed for "Did you know?" or "Featured articles" behind it.
Wikinews has a button (but its not in a gallery) at [[meta:Wikinews/Google_button]] (linky at [[n:WN:RSS]]). I don't know if it might be useful in creating the wikipedia button.
Component: General/Unknown -> Extension requests
Some people already designed some Wikipedia and all-Wikimedia-wikis search buttons for the Google toolbar. See: http://www.google.com/gadgets/directory?synd=toolbar&q=wikipedia So I am marking this feature request as FIXED.
