Problems with Google Toolbars retrieving PageRank in FF, IE & Chrome

[brianr]

Has anybody else been having trouble retrieving the pagerank with toolbars recently? I've tried toolbars in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. It seemed to be working again a couple of hours ago but it's sporadic. Even the seo quake toolbar has been returning a red "error" message some of the time. Not sure if Google is changing something or what.

[Robert Charlton]

Just checked with an official Google Toolbar in IE, and a third party toolbar in FF, and they both display OK.

Maybe it's a glitch in the central source of all PageRank, from which the green bar flows. ;)

Google has in the past changed the url of the source for third party tools only, but that situation apparently stabilized some time ago.

[brianr]

Thanks for checking it out Robert.

In the past they changed a parameter in the toolbar pagerank query from "search" to "tbr". I'm not sure what they're doing now. If you notice that the pagerank is greyed out in the toolbar on too many sites let me know. Hopefully it's not just happening for select IP addresses.

I've noticed that sometimes the page that should retrieve the pagerank just hangs sometimes which is why the toolbars can't get the pagerank. For instance, this page

http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?client=navclient-auto&hl=en&ch=61709880659&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=info:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webmasterworld.com%2Fgoogle%2F

should show "Rank_1:1:4" which means the page

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/

has a toolbar pagerank of 4 although sometimes the seo quake bar shows "error" and the page just hangs and never resolves for me.