WTH Is Going On With Toolbars

Wtf is it with tool bars for web browsers. At first it seemed like everyone and their grandmother had one and wanted you to install it but it was easy to say no. Now you can't install any kind of software without it wanting to install somebody's freaking toolbar and most of the time it comes right in the middle of installing the software when you are basically hitting the next button continuously, so it can sneak right by you. Everybody has a toolbar: Mapquest, Yahoo, Ask, Google, Big Dick McGee's BBQ Mud Wrestling and Sex Toy Emporium; and they all want on your browser. I don't get it either, if the toolbar offers a special service, I had one that verified the ip address and domain name of all sites for awhile when the phishing and redirecting first became a mini internet scam industry and I had a near fatality when I answered an email supposedly from ebay while a little too sleepy, I can understand, but when mostly what it does is internet search....WTF?

I use mapquest's toolbar at work. I have to do a lot of driving, mostly local. Realistically all it does is save me from going to the mapquest website. I hit the direction button and put in my start and first destination and it opens the webpage with that information all ready loaded and I just plug in the rest of my stops. I also use a specialized toolbar at home that has 2 or 3 features I like. Originally I made the mistake of installing the new Windows search, which didn't work anywhere near as well as the older more traditional search, at least for me, and which also caused the my documents folder the crash explorer pretty much everytime I opened it. While trying to figure out the issue, at first I thought it was a problem with a codec, I installed a third party file explorer, xplorer lite 2, I believe, a very nice little program, and it installed a toolbar on two of my three browsers. It got internet explorer and firefox but missed safari. It had a neat internet radio function so I left it on until I finally figured out it was slowing my browsers down. I then hunted up another toolbar just for the radio feature though.

In both of these cases, I am using a toolbar I found a need for and hunted down. Most of the functions of all of the toolbars though seem to be searching. The radio toolbar looks for music, mostly on torrent sites. Other that directions and maps, mapquest is mostly specialized search engines for gas priced, yellow pages, ect, with one basic websearch. This is what I don't get.

First off, when I first started surfing the net back in the stone ages, we had 2 ways to do an internet search. First you just go to your favorite search engine or web portal and search. Second, you just type the thing you were looking for into your browser address bar and it would automatically look it up for you. Neither of those things were really that difficult. Now things are even simpler, every browser I can think of in it's last couple of incarnations has had a separate little space where you could type in what you were looking for and it would search for it. If you don't find what you like, you can change the search engine you use right there. So why do we need all these extra toolbars? I see some convienence, but mostly unless they offer something that works better or offers a new feature, like the radio, or the it guys at work swear the google toolbars pop up blocker works better than firefox or ie's, why bother with them. And why are these companies so anxious to stick them on our browser that they bundle them with every piece of software they can.

I am sure it has to do with advertising, the more people use ask or yahoo or google, the more they can charge the advertisers on those sites, and the more they can charge to get top placement. And I would guess they gamble that most people aren't going to change the default search, for instance making ask the default on google's search bar. But still it seems awfully silly to me. The more junk on the top of the browser, the less room to see the actual material.