For years, I have been talking up the importance of putting links to other content at the bottom of every page of a website.  This way, you gently lead your website reader to more interesting information.  Its the “Customers Who Bought This…” theory that people love to browser, but they are more likely to be loyal to you if a link of interest is hand fed to them without any additional scrolling.

Some Google programmers recently issued a new application plugin for their search engine which plays off of this theory.  Retro Links allows you to choose other search engines to place at the bottom of your Google results.  In this way, once you get through your page 1 results, if you don’t find what you want, then you can simply choose another search engine to navigate that may have more focused results.

This plugin only works with Firefox (you should be using this browser anyway as it is the most stable, secure, and customizable) and an additional plugin called Greasemonkey, that is very easy to install.

One drawback to this feature.  Because it allows folks to leave Google after first page results, it will limit visibility for anyone on page 2 of Google results.  I’m sure there won’t be hordes of people downloading it but for the web savvy, searches may be more scattered…rather than Google focused.

Take a look at the blog post from Google’s Matt Cutts and try out the application.  Its very cool, it allows you to easily choose what search engines you want at the bottom of the page.