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.

I scrapped my old browser and downloaded Firefoxs latest version. Firefox provides faster browsing speeds than most browsers, allows you to view different sites in multiple tabs or windows and saves the sites you have open whenever you close the browser. Every time you access Firefox again, the same sites are displayed and saves you a lot of time. Next I downloaded the Google Pagerank and Alexa toolbars.

Alexa is a renowned service for ranking websites globally on their daily traffic. The higher the number of visitors the higher the ranking. The statistics are displayed at the bottom of the browser in the form of a graph and numerical ranking and alongside each website in the search results on Google in the form of a green bar. You can roll your mouse over the bar to see the actual ranking.

Googles Pagerank grades websites on a scale of zero to ten and shows up in the upper section of your browser. Ten is the best score awarded and depends on a host of factors like number of visitors, how old the site is, new content and other high-ranking sites that link to it. The scores are revised after larger intervals of time.

The aim is to use the most appropriate keywords, like cars for sale, and locate sites that are rank well with in toolbars. I give Alexa priority as it shows me websites with frequent daily traffic and hence is a good indicator of car websites and classifieds that have fresh ads every day. I soon discovered that sites on the second and even third page often had a larger number and variety of ads for cars on sale. I got to explore new and far more useful sites and soon had a large resource for different cars and their prices. Finding a better deal became a whole lot easier.

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.