Search and enjoy: 7 search toolbars reviewed

Check out this review by CNet:

If you’re still going to the Google or Yahoo home page to do Web searches, you’re missing half the fun–and you’re unnecessarily exerting your fingers. Toolbar plug-ins for Microsoft Internet Explorer–and now Firefox–make it easy and fast to look up Web references without having to type in another URL.

Web Ranking Tool

http://www.microsoft-watch.org/cgi-bin/ranking.htm

The first number we fetch is Alexa’s traffic rank for a domain on the web. This is based on a sampling of actual traffic to that domain, and it comes from the “phone home” feature on Alexa’s toolbar…
The second number reported by this web ranking tool is a count of total external backlinks from Yahoo. An external backlink is a link to a specific page from outside of that page’s own domain. Yahoo has much better reporting for backlinks than Google…

GMail Drive

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.
GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n'drop files to.

Check GMail account through RSS

Google is testing this out. If you login with your email address (not just your username) and your password you will be able to retrieve the first few lines of your messages.

Google Groups beta

Google now has a mailing list service similar to Yahoo Groups. It is in beta, but you can check it out at http://groups-beta.google.com/

You know… I have no problem with Google diversifying and adding services and features. As long as they are useful and high quality, who cares! And so far they haven’t disappointed.

I got a GMail account

Chris was invited to get a Google Mail (GMail) account a while ago, and today when he logged in, he was allowed to invite someone else to signup, so he sent me an invitation. I haven’t done much with it yet, but I’ll post comments if I think there is anything worth sharing.