Alexa Internet, Inc. is a
California
based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and website.
Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior
which is transmitted to the website where it is stored and analyzed
and is the basis for the company's
web
traffic reporting.
The
company's premises are in Building 37 of the Presidio of San
Francisco
in San
Francisco
, California.
Operations and history
Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by
Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat claiming it
would improve internet searching by tracking user decisions and
using that data to aid future searches.
The
company's name was chosen in homage to the Library of
Alexandria
, drawing a parallel between the largest repository
of knowledge in the ancient world to the potential for the Internet
if the alleged search problem could be solved. In addition,
ALEXA was originally an abbreviation for
Address
Lookup
EXperts
Authority.
The company offered a toolbar that gave Internet users suggestions
on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user
community. Alexa also offered context for each site visited: to
whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites
pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated.
Alexa includes archiving of webpages as they are crawled. This
database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet
Archive (also located in the Presidio) and its
Wayback Machine. Alexa
continues to supply the Internet Archive with
web crawls.
In 1999, Alexa was acquired by
Amazon.com
for about $250 million in Amazon
stock as the
company moved away from its original vision of providing an
'intelligent' search engine. Alexa began a partnership with Google
in spring 2002, and with the
Open
Directory Project in January 2003. In May 2006, Amazon replaced
Google with
Live Search as a provider of
search results. In September 2006, they began using their own
Search Platform to serve results. In December 2006, they released
Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it is the first major
application to be built on their Web Platform.
Alexa has "site info" for the
A9.com search
engine.
In December 2005, Alexa opened its extensive search index and
web-crawling facilities to third party programs through a
comprehensive set of
web services and
API. These could
be used, for instance, to construct
vertical search engines that could run on
Alexa's own servers or elsewhere. In May 2007, Alexa changed their
API to require comparisons be limited to 3 sites, reduced size
embedded graphs be shown using
Flash,
and mandatory embedded
BritePic ads.
In April 2007, the lawsuit
Alexa
v. Hornbaker was filed to
stop
trademark infringement
by the
statsaholic service. In the
lawsuit, Alexa alleges that Hornbaker is stealing traffic graphs
for profit, and that the primary purpose of his site is to display
graphs that are generated by Alexa's servers. Hornbaker removed the
term Alexa from his service name on March 19, 2007. Nevertheless,
Alexa expressly grants permission to refer its data in third-party
work subject to suitable credits.
On November 27, 2008, Amazon announced that Alexa Web Search was no
longer accepting new customers, and the service would be deprecated
or discontinued for existing customers on January 26, 2009.
Accuracy of ranking by the Alexa Toolbar
Alexa ranks sites based on tracking information of users of its
Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer
and from integrated sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape.
There is some controversy over how representative Alexa's user base
is of typical Internet behavior. If Alexa's user base is a fair
statistical sample of the
Internet user population (
e.g., a random sample of
sufficient size), Alexa's ranking should be quite accurate. In
reality, not much is known about the sample and possible
sampling biases. Alexa itself notes several
examples. A known source of bias is the
self-selecting, opt-in nature of Alexa
traffic tracking software installation, but the significance of
this bias on rankings is not reported.
On April 16, 2008 many users reported dramatic shifts in their
Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an
announcement that they had released the new Alexa ranking system,
claiming that they now take into account more data sources "beyond
Alexa Toolbar users".
Redesign and new statistics
On March 31, 2009 Alexa.com got a complete redesign and new metrics
including: Pageviews per User, Bounce Rate, and Time on Site. In
the following weeks they added new features including Demographics,
Clickstream and Search Traffic stats.
Spyware
The Alexa toolbar is regarded by many vendors, such as Symantec and
McAfee, as
spyware.
Symantec classifies the toolbar as trackware.
McAfee classifies it as
Adware, a "Potentially Unwanted Program."
McAfee Site Advisor rates the Alexa
website as yellow, with the warning:
"In our tests, we found downloads on this site that some people
consider adware, spyware or other potentially unwanted
programs,".
See also
References
- Alexa Announcement
External links
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
