I was too afraid to talk to Craig for my first two months at Quirk. Not because he's an unfriendly guy (in fact he's laughed at my jokes, which is enough to make me really like anyone) but rather because he's just so damn smart.

Like most really smart guys, he had an idea for a valuable but simple solution for SEOs worldwide - the idea for SearchStatus struck Craig on a rainy Saturday afternoon in the winter of 2004.

Today, hundreds of thousands of search engine marketers access SearchStatus through the bottom right hand corner of their browsers a couple of times a day (according to Alexa).

Now, if you don't have some kind of familiarity with SEO, it's unlikely you've ever heard of SearchStatus. The tool (which is an extension of Firefox), provides what Craig calls a “concise summary” of almost everything a Search Engine Marketer might want to know about their own or a competitor's website.

Craig hadn't originally thought the tool would take off the way it did, but was pleasantly surprised to see support from some major figures in search. “It was a big deal, a chap called Danny Sullivan wrote that he thought it was a good tool...he's considered the father of SEO” (you can see the post here). Jill Whalen, of HighRankings.com fame has also endorsed SearchStatus, as has Matt Cutts of Google. One of the tools most popular functions – highlighting NoFollow links (links that aren't indexed by Google), was actually a suggestion Craig sourced from Matt Cutt's blog.

Craig has handled all the developing of SearchStatus himself, and gets one or two emails a day from users reporting bugs or suggesting new features. “At least half the features and improvements over the years have come from users.”

Craig has always believed that SearchStatus shouldn't be commercialised, which means that Quirk doesn't gather any information about its users browsing habits, and released it for free. “Having that Quirk Q in everyone's browser is well worth it,” Craig pointed out, before laughingly adding “even though many users probably don't recognise it”.