Alexa Internet

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Alexa Internet, Inc.
Type	Public
Founded	1996
Headquarters	California
Key people	Brewster Kahle & Bruce Gilliat
Industry	Internet information providers
Products	Search Engine
Website	Alexa.com

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website (www.alexa.com) 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.

[edit] 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] Windows 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.

[edit] 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. There are several third-party extensions for Mozilla Firefox; these extensions do not affect Alexa website rankings.

• 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 (see Sampling). In reality, not much is known about the sample and it may or may not have many sources of sampling bias. Alexa itself notes several examples (here and here)

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.

[edit] See also

Competitors in the internet market research space include Compete, Inc, ComScore, Hitwise, Nielsen//NetRatings, and Netcraft.

• List of internet search engines
• List of web directories
• Alexa Toolbar

[edit] References

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ [2]
3. ^ [3]
4. ^ [4]
5. ^ [5]
6. ^ [6]

[edit] External links

• Alexa Internet - official site
  • About the Alexa Traffic Rankings
  • Alexa's data-mining platform
  • Alexa Image Search
  • Alexa is not spyware