Alexa Internet
| Alexa Internet, Inc. | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | Subsidiary |
| Founded | 1996 |
| Headquarters | California |
| Key people | Bruce Gilliat |
| Industry | Internet information providers |
| Products | Search Engine |
| Parent | Amazon.com |
 Screenshot of alexa.com home page |
|
| Website | Alexa.com |
| Type of site | web traffic &ranking |
| Registration | no |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Current status | active |
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on the web traffic to other websites. Alexa collects information from users who have installed an "Alexa Toolbar," allowing them to provide statistics on web site traffic, as well as lists of related links.
Operations and history
Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat.[1] The company offered a toolbar that gave Internet users guidance 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.[2] Engineers at Alexa, in cooperation with the Internet Archive, created the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.[3] Alexa also supplies the Internet Archive with web crawls.
In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about $250 million in Amazon stock.[4]
The company's premises are in Building 37 of the Presidio of San Francisco.
Alexa began a partnership with Google in spring 2002, and with the Open Directory Project in January 2003.[5] Live Search replaced Google as a provider of search results in May 2006.[6] 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. Today, Alexa is primarily a search engine, an Open Directory-based web directory, and a supplier of site information.[citation needed]
Alexa also provides "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 APIs. These could be used, for instance, to construct vertical search engines that could run on Alexa's own servers or elsewhere. Uniquely, their Web Search Platform gives developers access to their raw crawl data. 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.[7]
In April 2007, Alexa v. Hornbaker was filed to stop trademark infringement by the statsaholic service.[8] 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.[9][10] Hornbaker removed the term Alexa from his service name on March 19 2007.[11]
Concerns over Alexa rank information and the Alexa Toolbar
Alexa ranks sites based on visits from users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer
and from integrated sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape. In addition to their own statusbar extension, Sparky (released, July
2007), there are several third-party extensions for
- SearchStatus shows Google PageRank and Alexa TrafficRank
- About This Site Firefox plug-in that shows metadata from Alexa TrafficRank.
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 (here and here) 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.[12]
Another concern is whether Alexa ratings are easily manipulated. Some webmasters claim that they can significantly improve the Alexa ranking of less popular sites by making them the default page, by exchanging web traffic with other webmasters, and by requiring their users to install the Alexa toolbar; however, such claims are often anecdotal and are offered without statistics or other evidence.
Statistically speaking, based on the process of data acquisition through the toolbar and other limited and proprietary means, which is analogous to non-scientific sampling, the representative accuracy of Alexa's traffic and rank statistics is inversely squared in proportion to the actual traffic. In other words, the less actual website traffic, the higher the statistical inaccuracy increases exponentially. Of course, this has not been proven (and is going to be proven without access to Alexa's raw data), but can be demonstrated with a simple experiment. Start a new website on a new domain, or find one that is known to have virtually zero traffic with server-side traffic stats. After a baseline of zero traffic has been demonstrated for several months, begin loading the website daily with a browser that uses Alexa toolbar. Very quickly, the stats will rise above NA (or no data available) to levels that will appear to be higher than one visitor per day. After several weeks of this, where the trend has been marked, ask several friends to begin visiting that site daily with an Alexa enhanced browser. Then, even when it can be shown through webstats that only a small number of visits occur daily, the website will appear in Alexa to be on a comparable level with sites that are said to have thousands of hits.[citation needed]
See also
Competitors in the internet market research space include Compete, Inc, ComScore, Hitwise, Nielsen//NetRatings, Netcraft, Ranking.com and Quantcast.
References
- ^ ALEXA Internet Donates Archive of the World Wide Web To Library of Congress (1998-10-13).
- ^ Keith Dawson (1997-07-28). Alexa Internet opens the doors.
- ^ Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions.
- ^ Adam Feuerstein (1999-05-21). E-commerce loves Street: Critical Path plans encore.
- ^ Alexa History.
- ^ Elizabeth Montalbano (2006-05-01). Amazon dumps Google for Windows Live.
- ^ Amit Agarwal (2007-05-06). Alexa Traffic Charts Now Include Advertising. Retrieved on 2007-05-21.
- ^ Northern California District Federal court Case number - C 07-01715 RS. Retrieved on 2007-04-19.
- ^ Alan Graham (2007-04-18). Amazon sues Alexaholic…everyone loses!. Retrieved on 2007-04-19.
- ^ Tim O'Reilly (2007-04-20). Amazon Sues Alexaholic...Everyone Loses. Retrieved on 2007-04-20.
- ^ Pete Cashmore (2007-04-19). Amazon sues Statsaholic…Web as Platform is Bullsh*t. Retrieved on 2007-04-20.
- ^ Alexa.com: What is traffic rank?
External links
| Amazon.com | |
|---|---|
| People | Jeff Bezos • Rick Dalzell • Brian Valentine • Werner Vogels |
| Websites | A9.com • Alexa Internet • Amapedia • Amazon Daily • Amazon Fresh • Askville • CDNOW • Internet Movie Database • Joyo.com • Mobipocket • Questville |
| Web Services | Alexa Web Services • E-Commerce Service • EC2 • FPS • Marketplace • Mechanical Turk • S3 • Simple Queue Service |
| Other | 1-Click • Amazon Fishbowl • Amazon Standard Identification Number • Statistically Improbable Phrases • Unbox |
Annual Revenue:  $10.71 billion
USD (2006) • Employees: 13,900 (2006) • Stock Symbol:
NASDAQ AMZN |
|
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