Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Joel Spolsky and the Google Toolbar

I was listening to the "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" audiobook the other day, and was surprised hear the following:
"One of those products was a toolbar that tucked a searchbox right into users' browsers, enabling them to conduct Google searches without going to google.com. The product had been worked on by Joel Spolsky, a contract developer, based on prototypes developed by my UI team colleague Bay Chang."

I think the Google toolbar was introduced in 2000, back when the Joel-on-Software blog was in its heyday. But I don't remember Joel ever blogging about being involved in the Google toolbar development. I did a quick search now, and all I encountered was this Fog Creek discussion forum posting from 2003. Would be interesting to find out more on that...