Alexa Internet

Alexa Internet, Inc. is an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.

For the virtual assistant, see Amazon Alexa.
Alexa Internet, Inc.
Alexa home page in 2017
Type of businessSubsidiary
Type of site
Web traffic and ranking
Available inEnglish
FoundedApril 1, 1996 (1996-04-01)[1]
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California, U.S.
OwnerAmazon
Created byBrewster Kahle, Bruce Gilliat
PresidentAndrew Ramm[2]
Key peopleAndrew Ramm (President and GM)
Dave Sherfese (Vice President)[2]
Industry Internet information providers
ProductsAlexa Web Search (discontinued 2008)
Alexa toolbar
URLalexa.com
Alexa rank 3,545 (Global, August 2020)[3]
RegistrationOptional
Current statusOnline

Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock. Its toolbar collected data on Internet browsing behavior and transmits them to the Alexa website, where they are stored and analyzed. This is the basis for the company's web traffic reporting, including its Alexa Rank.[4] According to its website, Alexa provides web traffic data, global rankings, and other information on 30 million websites.[5] As of 2018, its website is visited by over 3 million people every month.

Operations and history

1996–1999

Alexa Internet was founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat.[6] The company's name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria of Ptolemaic Egypt, drawing a parallel between the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world and the potential of the Internet to become a similar store of knowledge.[7] Alexa initially offered a toolbar that gave Internet users suggestions on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community. The company 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.[8]

Alexa's operations grew to include archiving of web pages as they are "crawled" and examined by an automated computer program (nicknamed a "bot" or "web crawler"). This database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive accessible through the Wayback Machine.[9] In 1998, the company donated a copy of the archive, two terabytes in size, to the Library of Congress.[7] Alexa continues to supply the Internet Archive with Web crawls. In 1999, as the company moved away from its original vision of providing an "intelligent" search engine, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for approximately US$250 million in Amazon stock.[10]

2000–2009

Alexa began a partnership with Google in early 2002, and with the web directory DMOZ in January 2003.[11] 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 servers or elsewhere. In May 2006, Google was replaced with Windows Live Search as a provider of search results.[12] In December 2006, Amazon released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it was the first major application built on the company's Web platform. In May 2007, Alexa changed their API to limit comparisons to three websites, reduce the size of embedded graphs in Flash, and add mandatory embedded BritePic advertisements.

In April 2007, the company filed a lawsuit, Alexa v. Hornbaker, to stop trademark infringement by the Statsaholic service.[13] In the lawsuit, Alexa alleged that Ron Hornbaker was stealing traffic graphs for profit, and that the primary purpose of his site was to display graphs that were generated by Alexa's servers.[14] Hornbaker removed the term "Alexa" from his service name on March 19, 2007.[15] On November 27, 2008, Amazon announced that Alexa Web Search was no longer accepting new customers, and that the service would be deprecated or discontinued for existing customers on January 26, 2009.[16] Thereafter, Alexa became a purely analytics-focused company.

On March 31, 2009, Alexa revealed a major website redesign. The redesigned site provided new web traffic metrics—including average page views per individual user, bounce rate (the rate of users who come to, and then leave a webpage), and user time on website.[17] In the following weeks, Alexa added more features, including visitor demographics, clickstream and web search traffic statistics.[18] Alexa introduced these new features to compete with other web analytics services.

Alexa Traffic Rank

A key metric published from Alexa Internet analytics is the Alexa Traffic Rank also simply known as Alexa Rank. It is also referred to as Global Rank by Alexa Internet and is designed to be an estimate of a website's popularity. As of May 2018, Alexa Internet's tooltip for Global Rank says the rank is calculated from a combination of daily visitors and page views on a website over a 3-month period.[19]

The Alexa Traffic Rank can be used to monitor the popularity trend of a website and to compare the popularity of different websites.[20]

The traffic rank used to be determined from data recollected from users that had the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser; as of 2020 Alexa does not use a toolbar, instead it uses data from users that have installed any of a number of browser extensions and from websites that have the Alexa script installed on their webpages.[21][22]

Tracking

Toolbar

Alexa used to rank sites based primarily on tracking a sample set of Internet traffic—users of its toolbar for the Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers.[23][24] The Alexa Toolbar included a popup blocker (which stops unwanted ads), a search box, links to Amazon.com and the Alexa homepage, and the Alexa ranking of the website that the user is visiting. It also allowed the user to rate the website and view links to external, relevant websites. In early 2005, Alexa stated that there had been 10 million downloads of the toolbar, though the company did not provide statistics about active usage. Originally, web pages were only ranked amongst users who had the Alexa Toolbar installed, and could be biased if a specific audience subgroup was reluctant to take part in the rankings. This caused some controversies over how representative Alexa's user base was of typical Internet behavior,[25] especially for less-visited sites.[24] In 2007, Michael Arrington provided examples of Alexa rankings known to contradict data from the comScore web analytics service, including ranking YouTube ahead of Google.[26]

Until 2007, a third-party-supplied plugin for the Firefox browser[27] served as the only option for Firefox users after Amazon abandoned its A9 toolbar.[28] On July 16, 2007, Alexa released an official toolbar for Firefox called Sparky.[29] On 16 April 2008, many users reported drastic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an announcement that they had released an updated ranking system, claiming that they would now take into account more sources of data "beyond Alexa Toolbar users".[30][31]

Certified statistics

Using the Alexa Pro service, website owners can sign up for "certified statistics", which allows Alexa more access to a website's traffic data.[32] Site owners input JavaScript code on each page of their website that, if permitted by the user's security and privacy settings, runs and sends traffic data to Alexa, allowing Alexa to display—or not display, depending on the owner's preference—more accurate statistics such as total page views and unique page views.

Privacy and malware assessments

A number of antivirus companies have assessed Alexa's toolbar. The toolbar for Internet Explorer 7 was at one point flagged as malware by Microsoft Defender.[33] Symantec classified the toolbar as "trackware" in 2007.[34] McAfee classified it as adware, deeming it a "potentially unwanted program" in 2005[35] but McAfee Site Advisor rated the Alexa site "green" in 2007, finding "no significant problems", but warned of a "small fraction of downloads ... that some people consider adware or other potentially unwanted programs."[36] As of 2014, though it is possible to delete a paid subscription within an Alexa account, it is not possible to delete an account that is created at Alexa through any web interface.[37]

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See also

References
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  2. "Management". Alexa Internet. Retrieved December 24, 2014.
  3. "alexa.com Competitive Analysis, Marketing Mix and Traffic - Alexa". www.alexa.com. Retrieved August 14, 2020.
  4. "What is Alexa traffic rank and how to get the Alexa toolbar". Digital Business UK. Retrieved May 11, 2018.
  5. "About". Alexa. Retrieved January 18, 2015.
  6. "ALEXA Internet Donates Archive of the World Wide Web To Library of Congress". Alexa press release. October 13, 1998. Archived from the original on October 13, 2009. Retrieved October 9, 2009.
  7. "A "Gift of the Web" for the Library of Congress from Alexa Internet". October 19, 1998. Retrieved June 27, 2017.
  8. Keith Dawson (July 28, 1997). "Alexa Internet opens the doors". Retrieved October 9, 2009.
  9. "Internet Archive FAQs". Archived from the original on October 21, 2009. Retrieved October 9, 2009.
  10. Adam Feuerstein (May 21, 1999). "E-commerce loves Street: Critical Path plans encore". San Francisco Business Times. Retrieved November 5, 2013.
  11. "About Alexa Internet". Archived from the original on October 7, 2009. Retrieved October 9, 2009.
  12. Elizabeth Montalbano (May 1, 2006). "Amazon dumps Google for Windows Live". Infoworld. Retrieved November 6, 2011.
  13. "Northern California District Federal court Case number — C 07-01715 RS" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on April 22, 2007. Retrieved April 19, 2007.
  14. Alan Graham (April 18, 2007). "Amazon sues Alexaholic...everyone loses!". ZDnet. Retrieved March 14, 2016.
  15. Pete Cashmore (April 19, 2007). "Amazon sues Statsaholic...Web as Platform is Bullsh*t". Mashable. Retrieved February 14, 2013.
  16. John Cook (November 27, 2008). "Amazon pulling plug on Alexa Web Search". Archived from the original on December 3, 2008. Retrieved November 27, 2008.
  17. Geoffrey Mack (March 31, 2009). "Pardon our dust". Alexa Internet. Retrieved November 6, 2011.
  18. Geoffrey Mack (April 14, 2009). "More New Alexa Features: Demographics, Clickstream, Search Traffic". Retrieved October 9, 2009.
  19. "wikipedia.org Traffic Statistics". Alexa Internet. Global Rank. Archived from the original on May 9, 2018. Retrieved May 10, 2018.
  20. Fulham, Liz (May 10, 2018). "How & Why to Improve Your Alexa Ranking". Sales@Optimize. Archived from the original on November 16, 2017.
  21. https://www.alexa.com/about
  22. https://blog.alexa.com/alexa-panel-increase/amp/
  23. "Technology: How and Why We Crawl the Web". Alxa. Archived from the original on April 2, 2014. Retrieved November 6, 2011.
  24. Harold Davis (2006). Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, Adwords, and the Google APIs. O'Reilly Media. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-596-10108-4.
  25. Alistair Croll; Seán Power (2009). Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors. O'Reilly Media. p. 38. ISBN 978-0-596-15513-1.
  26. Michael Arrington. "Alexa's Make Believe Internet"; "Alexa Says YouTube Is Now Bigger Than Google. Alexa Is Useless". TechCrunch. 2007. Retrieved June 21, 2013.
  27. "SearchStatus: A Search Extension for Firefox and SeaMonkey" Archived June 27, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. Quirk.biz. Retrieved June 24, 2013.
  28. Home Archived June 8, 2008, at the Wayback Machine. A9.com. Retrieved June 24, 2013.
  29. "Sparky Add-on for Firefox Released Today". Alexa Blog. July 16, 2007. Retrieved June 24, 2013.
  30. "Alexa Announcement". Alexa. Archived from the original on April 24, 2008. Retrieved September 22, 2012.
  31. U "Alexa Overhauls Ranking System". TechCrunch. April 16, 2008. Retrieved December 1, 2012.
  32. "Alexa Pro for Digital Marketers". Alexa. Retrieved January 18, 2015.
  33. "Windows Defender calls Alexa Toolbar Trojan". TMCNet. March 2, 2007. Retrieved June 24, 2013.
  34. "Trackware. Alexa — Symantec.com". February 13, 2007. Retrieved July 5, 2008.
  35. "Adware-Alexa". February 23, 2005. Archived from the original on November 1, 2008. Retrieved July 5, 2008.
  36. "Alexa.com: Web Safety Ratings". McAfee SiteAdvisor. September 2007. Retrieved July 5, 2008.
  37. "Delete Alexa Account". Account Killer. Archived from the original on April 9, 2014. Retrieved June 20, 2014.
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