With the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) an abundance of information on the Internet has become available to people who have computers. Search engines have been developed to find information based on search terms that the users provide to the search engines. FIG. 1 depicts a block diagram of prior art interfaces for using search engines to find information on the Internet. For example, typically, users open a browser window 104 on a screen 102 of their computer 110, type the URL of the search engine 120A they want to use in order to display a user interface 106 for that particular search engine 120A. The user interface 106 will have one or more fields 106a for entering search terms. The user may instruct the search engine 120A to perform the search of information 130A associated with the search engine 120A based on the entered search terms when the user clicks on a button 106b. 
Different search engines (120A, 120B) have access to different sets of information (130A, 130B) on the Internet 140. For example, search engine 120A may have access to information 130A, which may include, for example, the contents of the Wall Street Journal, whereas search engine 120B may have access to information 130B, which may include, for example, the contents of Time magazine. Each search engine (120A, 120B) searches the information (130A, 130B) that it has access to based on search terms the user enters and provides results from the search to the user in the browser window 104. For example, search engine A would search information 130A and search engine B would search information 130B. The information each search engine has access to shall be referred to as the search engine's “environment.”
One problem with search engine user interfaces 106 is that they disappear when the user closes their browser window 104. A second problem with the search engine user interfaces 106 is that they take up a lot of space on the screen 102.
Referring to FIG. 1, free ware called “Dave's Quick Search”, which can be found at “notesbydave.com/toolbar/” has addressed this problem by providing a user interface 140 (referred to hereinafter as “Dave's user interface”) as a part of the task bar 108. Dave's user interface 140 provides a small window 140a that users can enter search terms into and a button 140b that users can click on to instruct the user's default search engine to perform a search based on the search terms currently in the window 140a. 
One problem with Dave's user interface 140 is that it takes up valuable space on the task bar 108.
For these and other reasons, a method and/or a system would be valuable that provides a search engine user interface that is available as long as the user's computer is on regardless of whether the browser is open. A method and/or system that does not take up valuable space on the task bar would also be value.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds