Google has long been thought of as the ultimate company for innovation, especially when the innovation is done in such a way as to become free for the general public to use. Other companies have already plied through the waters of proprietary software and now that the world is making huge strides towards the open source software concept, Google Toolbar is something that people are starting to take a much closer look at.

Google is a company that enjoys playing around with ideas and allowing their fan base to test those ideas out before they actually implement them. Google Labs is an overall concept that allows them to get general ideas out for people to test and comment on and Gmail Labs is the same concept with the Google Mail service that people have been switching over to in a wholesale method across the entire way. The Google Toolbar has become a large enough part of the Google experience now that people working on the Google Toolbar software package feel that it is time to start taking that idea and applying it directly to Google Toolbar. The result has been the Google Toolbar Lab, which has already turned out the first two ideas for users to take a look at.

The first of these lab releases is a version of the Google Toolbar known as Google Toolbar with My Location. The basic premise of this is that it brings together the convenience that you get from the Google Toolbar and the excellent functionality that the My Location function has been displaying with people that know how to use it. The end result was that the Google Toolbar was available with My Location built right into it so that all you have to do in order to access the benefits of the My Location function is simply use the Google Toolbar that is always available right near the top of your browser window.

You can program the location in and then whenever you feel like using the My Location function, all you need to do is type in what you want to search for and My Location will function in the same way it would before. You can type in pizza and get a listing of all the pizza places close to you and of course you can do that with anything else that you might want to search for close to the actual location in question. The full functionality of My Location is there, but now it is also ultra-fast and ultra-convenient, thanks to the people that came up with the Google Toolbar Labs.

The simplified Chinese Toolbar is another example of a Google Toolbar Lab invention. The name is self-explanatory, as this toolbar represents the Google Toolbar in all its glory, with Simplified Chinese characters being used instead of English. It serves to make the web more international and that can only be a good thing for everyone involved in the long term.