As a person who frequents online classifieds specializing in the sale of cars, I found it frustrating and a waste of time that many of the sites on the first page of Googles search results had infrequent ad postings. New ads did not show up for days in a row. I asked a more tech savvy friend of mine for help and he showed me how Alexa and Google Pagerank could help me out.

Despite unfounded reservations, my friend convinced me to switch browsers and use Firefox instead. In hindsight, it was a great move and I realized that not only was Firefox faster, it also saved the sites I had open in multiple tabs and reopened them for me when I restarted the browser. We then downloaded and installed Alexas site ranking and Googles Pagerank toolbars.

Alexa is one of the premier website ranking authority on the web. The toolbar once installed shows up as a graph and number in the lower right corner of your Firefox browser and as a bar alongside each of the search results in Google. The number indicates the websites daily global traffic ranking with a lower number representing higher traffic. The bar is longer for higher-ranking sites and also displays the ranking number upon moving your cursor over the bar. The more visitors a site has the better the ranking.

Pagerank ranks websites on their authority by using a combination of sites linking into a particular website, freshness of content, age of the site and the volume of visitors. It ranks sites on a scale of zero to ten with ten being the best score. It is normally displayed in the upper section of your browser. Unlike Alexa, several websites can achieve the same score and the scores are update after longer intervals of time.

Now all you have to do is use the Alexa bar in the search results to evaluate which site had higher daily traffic and therefore, more frequently posted ads and a larger variety of cars. Used collectively with Pagerank I came up with a great bunch of sites, many from the second and third search result pages, which ranked well with both services. I have access to a larger number of cars and comparing prices across these sites I get fantastic deals every single time.

The use of these tools is not restricted to the search for great deals on cars alone. It can be used practically for all the things you search for on the internet. Its simple and once you get past installing and getting acquainted with these utilities you wont want to search the web in any other way.

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