The SearchStatus toolbar for Firefox
I am constantly on the lookout for nice applications that can make my online life easier and a lot more efficient. As a person who makes a living out of the internet, my browser, Firefox of course, is full of plugins and addons that help me to get the most out of websites. But the problem is that a lot of plugins and addons most of the time means more toolbars that take up to much space on the browser. For example consider the Google toolbar and the Alexa toolbar. As a web developer you need to know the pagerank and alexa traffic rank for the different websites, but installing both toolbars takes up to much space and if you have a small monitor that is quite disturbing. Furthermore the alexa toolbar for Firefox wasn’t released until very recently and the button from Google’s toolbar that displays the pagerank of a page was showing the value only after the page was fully loaded which was pissing me of most of the times. But all was not lost.
Recently I discovered a nice little toolbar extension that sits on the browser’s status bar and displays the pagerank, alexa traffic rank and compete rank for all the websites visited. I am talking about SearchStatus, an addon developed by Craig Raw. Here is its description in the developer’s own words:
SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing. Designed for the highly specialized needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.
For every site you visit using, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. 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.
Sitting on the status bar on your browser, SearchStatus doesn’t take up any additional space and it provides a handful of useful information for the websites you are visiting. It is one of those applications that make your life easier and more productive.
