VS. NAME and DOWNLOAD LINK: Yahoo! Companion Toolbar vs. Google Toolbar DESCRIPTION: Two powerhouse search engines. MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS: Yahoo! - Windows, I.E. 4.0+ or Netscape 4.x; Google - Win9x/ME/NT/2000/XP, I.E. 5+. At this time it doesn't appear either toolbar works with the AOL browser. COMMENT: Let's cut to the chase. Both the heavyweight champion Google and contender Yahoo! are about equally fast, returning most of the same sites. Both give you alternate spellings for a search if they detect gross negligence. It's the other features that differentiate them. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar is described as a personalizable (look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls) toolbar that allows you to search from anywhere online, save your favorite bookmarks online and access them from any computer, get alerts when you have new Yahoo! Mail. Other benefits include: the Movies button displays show times in your favorite areas; search for stock quotes by entering ticker symbols; search Yahoo! News, Yellow Pages, Shopping, and more. Marketing-driven Yahoo! does put ad icons directly in their toolbar, which explains why it doesn't fully load until you're online. Google Toolbar counters with: the ability to search only the pages of the site you're visiting; access to more information about a page, including similar pages, pages that link back to that page, as well as a cached snapshot; you can highlight your search terms as they appear on the page, each word in its own color. Other features: Google Toolbar automatically updates itself when a new version is available; offers much more information about installing and uninstalling as well as handling errors; you can clear the toolbar's search history (including those embarrassing entries); to save monitor space you can toggle the Toolbar on and off; if you like or dislike a page you can vote for or against it using the happy/unhappy buttons Oh, there's more: You can drag any text or URL from the page you are viewing onto the Google Toolbar to run a search; translate search results into your chosen language; translate text using the (surprise) Translate tool. RATING: While Yahoo! provides more collateral services, Google is still our choice for the serious searcher.