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Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc.
The company’s premises are in Building 37 of the Presidio of San Francisco.
Type Founded Headquarters Industry Products Parent Website Type of site Advertising Registration Available in Current status Screenshot
Subsidiary 1996[1] San Francisco, California Internet information providers Search Engine Amazon.com Alexa.com Web traffic and ranking Web banner with AdBrite N/A English Active
Operations and history
Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat[2] 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,[3] 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.[4] 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.[5] 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[6] 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.[1] Live Search replaced Google as a provider of search results in May 2006.[7] 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.
Screenshot of alexa.com home page
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.
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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.[8] In April 2007, the lawsuit Alexa v. Hornbaker was filed to stop trademark infringement by the statsaholic service.[9] 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.[10][11] Hornbaker removed the term Alexa from his service name on March 19, 2007.[12] Nevertheless, Alexa expressly grants permission to refer its data in third-party work subject to suitable credits.[13] 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. [14]
Alexa Internet
announcement that they had released the "New Alexa Ranking System" claiming that they now take into account more data sources "beyond Alexa Toolbar users".[18]
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.[19] In the following weeks they added new features including Demographics, Clickstream and Search Traffic stats.[20].
Spyware
The Alexa toolbar is regarded by many vendors, such as Symantec and McAfee, as spyware. Symantec classifies the toolbar as Trackware.[21] McAfee classifies it as Adware, a "Potentially Unwanted Program."[22] 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,".[23]
See also
Competitors in the Internet market research space include ComScore, Hitwise, Quantcast, Compete.com and Netcraft. • List of search engines • List of web directories • Alexa Toolbar
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.[15][16] 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.[17] On April 16, 2008 many users reported dramatic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an
References
[1] ^ "Alexa History". http://www.alexa.com/ site/company/history. [2] "ALEXA Internet Donates Archive of the World Wide Web To Library of Congress". 1998-10-13. http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/1998/ 98-167.html. [3] "A "Gift of the Web" for the Library of Congress from Alexa Internet". 1998-10-19. http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/ nbreader.asp?ArticleID=17893. [4] Keith Dawson (1997-07-28). "Alexa Internet opens the doors". http://www.tbtf.com/archive/ 1997-07-28.html.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[5] "Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions". http://www.archive.org/ about/faqs.php. [6] Adam Feuerstein (1999-05-21). "Ecommerce loves Street: Critical Path plans encore". http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/ sanfrancisco/stories/1999/05/24/ newscolumn4.html. [7] Elizabeth Montalbano (2006-05-01). "Amazon dumps Google for Windows Live". http://www.infoworld.com/article/ 06/05/01/ 77974_HNgoogledumped_1.html. [8] Amit Agarwal (2007-05-06). "Alexa Traffic Charts Now Include Advertising". http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/05/ alexa-traffic-charts-now-include.html. Retrieved on 2007-05-21. [9] "Northern California District Federal court Case number - C 07-01715 RS" (PDF). http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/z/ 200701/show_case_doc-1.pdf. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. [10] Alan Graham (2007-04-18). "Amazon sues Alexaholic…everyone loses!". http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/ ?p=350. Retrieved on 2007-04-19. [11] Tim O’Reilly (2007-04-20). "Amazon Sues Alexaholic...Everyone Loses". http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/ 04/amazon_sues_ale.html. Retrieved on 2007-04-20. [12] Pete Cashmore (2007-04-19). "Amazon sues Statsaholic…Web as Platform is Bullsh*t". http://mashable.com/2007/04/
Alexa Internet
19/amazon-suesalexaholic%e2%80%a6web-as-platformis-bullsht. Retrieved on 2007-04-20. [13] "Alexa Web Search - Help". http://www.alexa.com/site/help/ ?index=129. Retrieved on 2008-07-05. [14] "Amazon pulling plug on Alexa Web Search". http://www.techflash.com/ Report_Amazon_pullling_plug_on_Alexa_Web_Search Retrieved on 2008-11-27. [15] About the Alexa Traffic Rankings [16] Frequently Asked Questions [17] Alexa.com: What is traffic rank? [18] Alexa Announcement [19] http://awis.blogspot.com/2009/03/ pardon-our-dust.html [20] http://awis.blogspot.com/2009/04/morenew-alexa-features-demographics.html [21] "Trackware. Alexa - Symantec.com". http://www.symantec.com/ security_response/ writeup.jsp?docid=2004-062410-3624-99. Retrieved on 2008-07-05. [22] "Adware-Alexa". http://vil.nai.com/vil/ content/v_131087.htm. Retrieved on 2008-07-05. [23] "alexa.com". September 2007. http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ alexa.com. Retrieved on 2008-07-05.
External links
• • • • Alexa Internet — Official site Alexa’s search platform Alexa Sparky Alexa Ranking: Does it matter?
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_Internet" Categories: Amazon.com, Companies established in 1996, Companies based in San Francisco, California, Internet search engines, Marketing research companies, Internet marketing companies This page was last modified on 18 May 2009, at 19:07 (UTC). All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) taxdeductible nonprofit charity. Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers
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