Pagerank info for Firefox: SearchStatus
I’m not sure how I overlooked this, the one thing I miss about IE is the ease at which I could check PageRank (using the Google Toolbar). Thankfully I’ve recently discovered that there’s a Firefox extension, SearchStatus which will not only tell you a page’s PR, but also give you its Alexa info.
From the developer’s website:
SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for users of both Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox, designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers. The toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.
For every site you visit using Firefox or Mozilla, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN - all in one place. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy.
The SearchStatus Mozilla/Mozilla Firefox extension appears unobtrusively at the bottom of the browser on the status bar. If you choose to view backward links for a particular page, they open in new tabs in the same browser window. Disable the automatic Google and Alexa queries and they fold away from view.
I installed it to Firefox but at first didn’t see the indicators. I restarted a second time and they appeared. They have a nice set of options so you can choose where the PR and Alexa info appears. For example, I currently have my info appearing in the “toolbar-menu” bar, to the “right of” the “menu-bar items”.
Another set of options, marked “Privacy” lets you exclude URIs you don’t want reported to Google or Alexa, and there is a check box that lets you connect using Anonymization.org. Great touches in my opinion.
I installed the extension on two copies of Firefox (1.0.2) - one is on an XP Home machine, the other on a Win 2000 box. I noticed on my Win 2000 computer, the display seems to jump around. This is after I altered the Privacy set of options. Perhaps I somehow changed the General Options while I was doing that? We’ll see if the problem persists. No issues with the extension on the XP box though.
All in all I’m quite happy with the extension and definitely recommend it.
