Alexa

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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.
Contents
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* 1 Operations and history
* 2 Accuracy of ranking by the Alexa Toolbar
* 3 Redesign and new statistics
* 4 Spyware
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 External links

[edit] 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] In May 2006, Amazon replaced Google with Live Search as a provider of search results.[7] In September 2006, they began using their own Search Platform[clarification needed] 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"[clarification needed] 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. 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]
[edit] Accuracy of ranking by the Alexa Toolbar
Main article: 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.[13] 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.[clarification needed][13]

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".[15]
[edit] 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.[16] In the following weeks they added new features including Demographics, Clickstream and Search Traffic stats.[17]
[edit] Spyware

The Alexa toolbar is regarded by many vendors, such as Symantec and McAfee, as spyware. Symantec classifies the toolbar as trackware.[18] McAfee classifies it as Adware, a "Potentially Unwanted Program."[19] 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 potentiall