Quirk's SearchStatus is a free add-on that displays the search ranking of any site you visit with Firefox. It displays Google PageRank and Category, Alexa popularity ranking and related links, Complete.com ranking, SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank, and backward links from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This combination of link importance and traffic importance data gives a more balanced view of a site's efficacy.

SearchStatus downloads, installs, and configures like any Firefox extension. We opened Firefox's add-ons manager and accessed the program's tabbed options dialog, which, though compact, offered a wider range of placement options than any Firefox add-on we've yet seen, with seven toolbar options in a drop-down menu as well as the ability to select the right or left side of other add-ons. The Privacy tab let us add URLs to exclude, and the External tab let us select our WHOIS source: Whois-search.com, DomainTools.com, DNSstuff.com, or Who.is. The add-on's Web page offered some instructions, including a link to a YouTube tutorial, version notes, and documentation. We could also select automatic or manual updates.

We browsed to a variety of Web sites. SearchStatus displayed available data in the status bar, including small but clear linear bar graphs for PageRank and Alexa data. Hovering our cursor over either called up its actual value in a small box. Clicking the SearchStatus icon opened an extensive context menu that included more options, such as Meta Tags, show sitemap.xml, Show robots.txt, Show Keyword Density, and many others. We added Complete Rank and mozRank to the display via this menu, too. SearchStatus is certainly one of the most unobtrusive yet effective tools of its kind we've yet sampled.