Is it just me, or does it seem every man and his pet poodle is in the business of releasing toolbars these days? The big three, Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search, all have there own take on the toolbar, and you would think given the creativity being displayed by the major players at the moment, one of them would forge new territory. Well, sadly, there all basically identical, although MSN does squeeze in few unique links to My MSN (its personalized homepage portal), MSN Spaces (Blogging Portal) and MSN Messenger.

When it comes to appearance, I guess there’s little you can do to differentiate one toolbar from another, although some way of applying a “skin” to these toolbars would be rather funky. Apart from jumbling up the icons so they don’t look like a direct copy of each other, all the toolbars look very similar.

Another feature of the MSN toolbar is the tabbed browsing option. Basically this adds your open browsing windows to a tabbed bar just underneath the toolbar, and even though it sounds like a great way of creating more window clutter, it actually works quite well. I find myself using it more and more, and it’s easily the best feature.

Toolbars give there respective companies a very focused and somewhat personalized way of interacting with there customers, and whomever has the most widely used toolbar gains a little more leverage in the desire for the ultimate goal – the most popular search engine. Since installing the MSN Toolbar, I find myself using MSN Search far more than I use too, which I guess is music to the ears for the boffins at Microsoft.

Off course, what would be truly useful is a way of mixing and matching these features to create the ultimate search engine toolbar, perhaps an expansion of the customization already available in Windows. In regards to customization, the Yahoo toolbar is the clear winner in this regard, with more links to various portals (personals, games and music etc) and an option to add your favorite sites.

Overall, you get the feeling though, that with so much at stake, MS isn’t going to be in a hurry to promote of elements of the Google and Yahoo toolbars, without a good deal of persuasion in the process.