Web search engine company Google is testing the possibility of enabling its toolbar software to be a means by which visitors can make their PCs part of a supercomputer to tackle knotty scientific problems.

More than 500 people have been invited to try out a new version of the toolbar that lets Windows users donate their computer's downtime to Stanford University's Folding@home project, which is looking at how genetic information is converted into proteins.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that the main idea was to use Google's expertise with large computer systems and try to give something back to science.

He explained that an option on the toolbar lets the participants download the necessary software to their computer.

The plan will be to expand the research to other projects, and possibly computational problems, to benefit its search business, said Brin.

Google's project is another example of distributed computing, in which jobs are farmed out in small chunks to ordinary PCs across the internet.

The new toolbar overcomes one of distributed computing's major weaknesses which is physically getting the software to those wanting to be involved.