Prog - Google with PageRanks

Posted by Neil Crosby on June 20, 2004 10:17 PM

Prog - PageRank Search Engine

I was first told about this re-envisioning of Google’s results a couple of weeks ago on the SearchGuild forums. The premise of the website is that many SEOs like to know what PageRank particular pages have, and that there should be an easier, cross platform, tool for them to use to check it.

As well as showing you the PageRank of all returned pages, Prog also gives you an easy link to view all incoming links for any particular result. I’ve found this so handy, that I now use Prog as my default search engine in Mozilla. Here’s how I did that…

First off, you need to enable Internet Keywords in the “Smart Browsing section of Mozilla’s Preferences window. Be aware though that enabling Internet Keywords will stop Mozilla from automatically appending .com to an incomplete domain name when you press enter.

Now that we’ve enabled Internet Keywords, we can set up Prog to handle them. To do this, enter about:config into the address bar and hit enter. You should be greeted with a huuuuuge list of preferences. Locate the preference called keyword.URL, rightclick and choose “modify”. Replace the current URL with http://www.webmasterbrain.com/prog/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q= and you’re done!

To test that you’ve set Mozilla up to use Prog as the default keyword search engine, simply enter a search term into your address bar, and hit enter. You should be greeted with a lovely Prog results page. If you want to perform a search such as site:www.workingwith.me.uk, then simply prepend the search term with keyword:, otherwise Mozilla will tell you that “site is not a registered protocol”.

So, there we go. Prog - a wonderful tool.

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