System and method for displaying advertisements using a toolbar

Abstract

Systems and methods have been developed for displaying advertisements within a toolbar. The toolbar display is generated by a toolbar application that searches content displayed within a browser window. For each web page, one or more keywords are selected based on the contents of the web page and an advertisement associated with the selected keywords is obtained. The advertisement, which may be in the form of a hyperlink or user-selectable text or icon, is then displayed within an area of the toolbar display. In this way, toolbars associated with online service providers, such as search toolbars, may be used to actively display advertisements to users in addition to providing convenient, yet passive, access to its associated online service. In order to display the advertisement, the toolbar display may scroll text within the display or may automatically expand the area of the display to show the advertisement or advertisements displayed.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.