Did you know that Google has indexed 18,800 pages for Download Squad? To be honest, neither did we. But that's the sort of information you can get from Xinu, a new web stats tracker.

Just type a URL into Xinu and sit back while it compiles data from all the usual suspects plus a few unusual ones. You'll get the site's Technorati, Alexa, and Google details. but Xinu also grabs data from Yahoo!, Windows Live Search, Lycos, Digg, Bloglines, Clipmarks, and a bunch of other services.

But Xinu doesn't stop there. It also gives you several rather useless statistics like the number of words and characters in a web site's name. Maybe they just wanted to have enough data to fill a whole page.

Update: As has been pointed out in the comments, it looks like the site has been suspended. We'll keep you posted if we hear that Xinu resurfaces.

[via TechCrunch]

Sometimes you just need to know a little bit more information about the site you're looking at. Maybe you're trying to decide if it's trustworthy, or maybe you're just a little bit (or too) curious. Well in any event, if you're looking to snoop, check out GreatDB.

Punching in a URL into GreatDB will bring back most of the following information: Whois, Site Age, Blacklisting Status, Language, Web Host, Ping Time, Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Backlinks, Search Engine Indexes, DMOZ Listings, Wayback Entries, Top 5 Keywords, Domain Extension Availability, and a Preview Image. Not bad considering all it takes is about 20 seconds of your time.

Probably the creepiest data point on the list is web host, which could be used nefariously to prey on hosting companies with weak security. But everything on the list is information that is publicly available if you know where to look, so it's hard to take issue with any of them.

It is commonly believed that Google's initial success in leapfrogging the incumbent search engines early in its history was due in large part to PageRank, a web page ranking algorithm that paid attention to how other sites linked to a page to determine how important that page truly was. Eventually Google would expose the approximate PageRank of a given site using the Google Toolbar, which lead to a whole new way of valuing webpages. Previously, traffic was the only metric that mattered, but now with PageRank it was possible to see "important" a given page was.

Google has never published the secret sauce behind how PageRank actually works, although it is believed that PageRank's overall importance in determining search engine rankings has dropped considerably in response to people attempting to game the algorithm. Regardless, it still holds a certain mystique, and if you're interested in learning a bit more about what is currently known about PageRank, Smashing Magazine has an article you'll want to read called Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It? Since most of this is conjecture, take it with a grain of salt, but it appears some good work has gone into compiling this information.

"And we want to be on the first page of Google," another new client said matter-of-factly, as the after-thought of our Web design meeting. I nodded, inhaled, and began my spiel.

"What are your stats now?" I asked, although I knew the answer. Many small businesses don't review their site stats, don't know how to view them online and can't really interpret them, but all Web site rebuilding plans include being on the first page of Google results. Let's try to marry the want with some how-to and understand how this works.

KNOW YOUR STATS
Know what your Web stats are. Contact your Web firm and demand the link. Bookmark them. Look at them! Pay attention to the "search keyphrases" and "search keywords" that users enter into search engines and find your site.

Site traffic is saved to logs and statistics programs display the data. Web stat programs are usually loaded on the server, so they have to be available from your hosting company. One of the most common stat packages is Webalizer, a fast and free log file analyzer. There are countless guides to help you interpret the numbers. And the mystery between "hits" and "visits" is explained here. Another common stat program is AWStats, an open source project at SourceForge There is a plethora of stat programs, many of which are free [see DLS for more info]

BUY BETTER STATS
You can buy access to better, more colorful stats with graphs and charts and circles and arrows. If you have a marketing department, they should take a look at WebTrends for small business, one of the older analytics, and check out the demos. WebTrends, like many other quality stat packages, is not free, so decide if the pretty pictures are worth the price.

I WANT TO BE ON THE FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE!
You want higher ranking in the search engines' results? In the olden days, everyone played on the same field. Nowadays, it takes a village to raise your rankings. Try these suggestions, many of which are human-intensive.

dnScoop is an online tool that bunches many popular domain lookup tools into one.

It's a location where users can check out the traffic of a particular domain, see the domains history, popularity, PageRank, count inbound links, and perhaps the coolest feature, get a site's dollar value report.

Start off by entering your chosen URL, and then choose a category from the 10 supplied. dnScoop will spit out the results pretty quickly after running through a number of checks and balances.

For instance, in a search on downloadsquad.com, we see that the domain has a Google PR value of 6 with 1,390,153 inbound links. Alexa traffic ranks are provided, as well as the number of indexed pages downloadsquad.com has in major search engines. Last but not least, the most interesting feature, the value report. dnScoop takes all of the above results and calculates them with a special formula to give them a dollar amount. In this case, downloadsquad.com is valued at $5,654,000. And of course you can show this amount off with your very own valuation button to add to your website.

It's a neat figure to show off to your friends, but I wouldn't base any real life transactions on dnScoop data.

Google has finally released version two of their browser toolbar for Firefox. The new version picks up on some of the features that have been in the latest version for IE for some time, but as they state on the Official Google Blog, Firefox and IE users have different needs, so there are some differences between the two toolbars.

Luckily, it appears that everything I was hoping for is there, including spell checking (including a new 'autofix' feature), Send from Gmail which intercepts mail links online and allows you to use Gmail as your mail client rather than popping up another mail client's window, and some classic features like the ability to go up a level, AutoFill in online forms, and of course the famous PageRank indicator.

Of course enterprising Firefox users have probably found ways to replicate most of this functionality using other extensions. But it's nice to get the "official" one from Google, that contains so much useful functionality all packaged neatly together. Now I can leave my search field in Firefox set to search DownloadSquad and use the search field on the Google Toolbar to search Google.

Search Engine Optimization is all but a dirty phrase these days, but SEOpen is a neat Firefox extension regardless. It puts at your fingertips rank, traffic, and incoming links information from more than a dozen sites, including Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Alexa. SEOpen also gives you access to other information like WHOIS data and HTTP response headers, all from one right-click menu.