Free Download A Day

Among the challenges facing webmasters and search engine optimization consultants, is that of understanding how you rank on the various search engines for your all-important keywords. If knowledge is power, then understanding where you show up in search results is the ultimate power. Digging manually through page after page of search results can be a big drain on your time. Automated tools can be expensive and have a steep learning curve.

Rank Tracker will let you track an unlimited number of keywords for an unlimited number of websites. You can see how your rankings move over time, with change records for daily, weekly, and monthly fluctuations. Progress graphs make it easier to understand your ranking and trends over time. Rank Tracker currently supports over three dozen different search engines, so the ones you are most interested in are probably included.

Available through a free license for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Rank Tracker can be an important part of your website promotion strategy.

Download Rank Tracker

While it’s been available for Windows for quite some time, Mac-o-philes have never been able to use the Google Desktop–until now.

With Google Desktop, you increase the power of your searches, beyond what’s available to you with Spotlight. You can do a thorough search of your Mac’s files, while at the same time including your Gmail and browser history as part of that search. Conversely, if your are doing a Web search with Google and it turns out that you already have a relevant item on your local system–perhaps a document you downloaded just last week–it will also appear in the Google results page.

Google Desktop indexes your local files, so that it can look for relevant results when you run a search. As with the out-in-the-world version of Google, the Desktop app creates cached versions of these files. This means that if you happen to delete a document from your system and need to get it back, there is a good chance you will find it in the cache, saving you a lot of extra grief.

In much the same way that you can start local and expand to the Web, or vice versa, you can invoke Google Desktop locally, by pressing the [Command] key twice to bring up the Quick Search Box, or you can click on the Desktop link on the Google homepage.

Installing the application adds a Google Desktop preference panel to your System Preferences, configuring Google Desktop so that it will work best for you.

Google Desktop for Mac is, as with many Google tools, strictly speaking a Beta release, so you should heed standard warnings about not relying on it for mission-critical application. Google Desktop requires OS X 10.4+.

Download Google Desktop for Mac

While there are many free web browsers available out there, Flock is a browser with a difference.

Built on Mozilla technologies, Flock combines the best of web browsers with a social component. Flock comes with a built-in blog editor, RSS feed reader, and del.icio.us tagger. Run across an interesting web site? Grab images and text and post them to your blog without having to leave the page. Share your photos with built-in support for Flickr and Photobucket.

The search feature allows you to search through your browser history, looking for terms in the pages you’ve visited, not just their titles, as well as your favorites and the Web.

There are some application-specific extensions available, but Flock also appears to support many Firefox extensions, or you can build one of your own with the instructions and API reference available on their website.

Flock is still in “pre-1.0” release, so there may be a few bugs along the way. The good thing, however, is that since it is a project still in active development, you can help to make it even better by reporting back your user experience.

If the social component of the Web is important to you, you may want to give Flock a try.

Download Flock

It's easy to acquire hundreds of website bookmarks over the years, but it's difficult to keep them organized in a useful manner. It's even more problematic to know if the bookmarked sites still exist if they haven't been visited in a while. AM Deadlink is a handy freeware program which detects dead links and duplicate links in browser bookmarks and text files. Once you've verified that a link is indeed no longer useful, you can delete it permanently. It will be easier to find the important bookmarks when the dead ones aren't cluttering things up.

AM Deadlink works with bookmarks/favorites in many of the most popular browsers, including IE, Netscape, Firefox, and Opera. It can also work with urls in tab delimited and comma separated text files. One other nice feature of AM Deadlink is that it can download the favicons for bookmarked sites, and display them in IE, Firefox, and Opera. The software author maintains a support forum on his website.

Download AM Deadlink

Cooliris is a nifty browser plugin which allows you to preview the content of hyperlinks without ever leaving the current webpage. If you're faced with a page full of links, you no longer have to pick and choose which ones to click at random. Cooliris will give you a glimpse of each links' webpage, so you can easily filter out the sites which look junky, and go straight to the sites which are of obvious interest. Cooliris will also show you previews of search results, Del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, and YouTube videos. It can be a real time saver.

The Cooliris plugin is currently available for many popular browsers, including IE, Safari, Firefox, and Flock, although the IE7 version is still in beta testing. The software's website has excellent documentation and support features if you run into any problems or have questions.

Download Cooliris

Pastor is a freeware program for Max OS X that will help you organize your passwords, website logins, serial numbers, and other information which is necessary to have but difficult to remember. Install the program by dragging it to your Applications folder, and you'll be immediately ready to take control of the password monster. Pastor can even generate passwords for you, then automatically store them, so you'll have maximum security without fear of being locked out of your website or application.

Documentation for the program is minimal, but the developer's website contains an FAQ. You can also contact the developer by email if you have questions, but the program is quite simple and intuitive.

Get Pastor

The Opera web browser has been released in "new and improved" version 9.1. Once upon a time, users had to pay for the privilege of using Opera, but the browser is now free for users of all major operating systems including Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's loaded with useful features, including tabbed browsing (with thumbnail preview), a popup blocker, a file download manager, a password manager, and a built-in BitTorrent application. The program also features some innovative concepts like "mouse gestures", where you can train your browser to perform specific tasks (like opening a link), when you move your mouse in a defined pattern. Widgets are another popular Opera feature.

Alternative browsers like Opera are often of interest to people with Internet security concerns, and Opera 9.1 is full of features to protect the user. Opera supports 256-bit encryption, and clearly displays the security level of the site being visited in the browser bar. You can clear the history and cache when exiting the browser, to protect your privacy, and there are a variety of ways to accept or deny cookies. The browser also has anti-phishing protection.

The Opera website clearly describes all the browser's features with text and video demos, and there's a large support community if you have questions or need assistance.

Download Opera 9.1.

We at Free Download A Day are so not about make-money-fast scams and the like, so we took this with a grain of salt at first. But a lot of smart business folks that we know believe this is on the up-and-up, and in fact could be a great way to get some "passive income". That is, money with very little work.

The software is called Agloco: it's a "viewbar" that puts little advertisements at the bottom of your web browser window. They'll pay you for each hour that you have the ads showing, up to a monthly limit. And if you refer friends to use the software, they pay you a cut for their browsing time too. I think that's where the big money could be: the company says that for every 5 friends that you refer, your income will double.

The Agloco viewbar isn't actually available yet (it's in limited beta testing): but if you're thinking of trying it, you should sign up sooner than later. Get in the system, and maybe invite some friends to join, so that you'll be among the first on board when the viewbar does launch.

The site has a "member calculator" that's fun to play with: enter the number of people you think you'll refer, and how many each of them will refer, and you'll see a "potential earnings" dollar amount — a number that gets pretty big quickly. We have no idea if that number is realistic or not, but we're certainly going to try it — why not?

A few years ago there was a "get paid to surf the web" service called AllAdvantage that was similar in many ways. The company eventually crashed and burned, but along the way a lot of people (some of which we know personally, and have verified) earned thousands and thousands of dollars. We have no idea if Agloco will fare any better or worse, but we're in to give it a try.

Sign up with Agloco

There are lots of programs out there that enable you to place "snipe" bids on ebay — that's to say, to delay your bid until the last second so as to keep the final price down. For those who like to snipe, BidNobble's for you!

This program is young and still developing, but useful. There are a number of options to customize the way the program acts and appears on the screen. It can access all the various ebay sites; connects by Secure Socket Layer protocol; supports multiple users; synch's with ebay's time; and tracks auctions by their time remaining, informing you of their status as it goes. This is of course in addition to the usual last-zillionth of a second-bid-placement procedure.

The author of the program invites feedback and suggestions as well as bug reports, so here's your chance to have a hand in the development of a popular tool. The program will run on any system that has the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.4 or newer (and provides a download if you need it.) The documentation is comprehensive although a little idiosyncratic in parts.

Get BidNobble

Adium is an instant messaging client for MacOS X. It was first written in 2001 by Adam Iser, a college student at the time, and has progressed through incremental improvements and complete rewrites (to make use of more capable libraries) to the point where it is now a very popular tool.

Its particular strength vs. iChat (the IM client that's built into MacOS X) is the number of protocols that it supports, and therefore the number of IM services that it can communicate with. These include AOL, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber, and Google Talk. Technically, the fact that it relies greatly on plugins rather than its own hard code makes it easy to extend and expand. As well, "xtras" defined by users can be applied to change the emoticons the program uses, Dock icons, contact list styles, message styles, and sound sets; AppleScripts can be used to alter the program's response to certain trigger events.

There are literally dozens of free IM clients out in cyberspace and a review such as this can't possibly compare them all. There is an article in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messengers which goes into a very comprehensive comparison. Adium makes the grade as one finds evidence of great user and developer activity.

Get Adium