This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2011) Alexa Internet Inc. Type Subsidiary Founded 19961 Headquarters San Francisco California USA Industry Internet information providers Products Search Engine Parent Amazon.com Website Alexa.com Type of site Web traffic and ranking Advertising Web banner with AdBrite Registration N/A Available in English Current status Active Screenshot

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

Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat.2 The company's name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria3 drawing a parallel between the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world to the potential of the Internet.

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's operation includes archiving of webpages as they are crawled. This database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive accessible through the Wayback Machine.5 In 1998 the company donated a copy of the archive 2 terabytes in size to the Library of Congress.3 Alexa continues to supply the Internet Archive with web crawls.

In 1999 Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about $250 million in Amazon stock6 as the company moved away from its original vision of providing an 'intelligent' search engine. Alexa began a partnership with Google in early 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 Platformclarification 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.

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 alleged that 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.1011 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 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 Firefox and Chrome.1516 Hence the page is only ranked between users who have these sidebars installed and may be biased if specific audience is reluctant to do this (Windows Defender has classified the sidebar as malware while it assigns it to trojans where it does not belong17). Also the rank is based on three month data18 and takes a long time to reflect changes in content that may happen after the domain has been soldcitation needed. Finally low ranks cannot be accurate not just because of the lack of data but also because of statistic laws related to the long tail distribution. The same laws make ranking of the popular sites highly accurate.19 There is some controversy over how representative Alexa's user base is of typical Internet behavior20 especially for less trafficked sites.16 In 2007 Michael Arrington provided a few examples of relative Alexa ranking known to contradict data from comScore including ranking YouTube ahead of Google.21 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".22 Redesign and new statistics On March 31 2009 Alexa.com underwent a complete redesign with new metrics including: Pageviews per User Bounce Rate and Time on Site.23 In the following weeks they added new features including Demographics Clickstream and Search Traffic stats.24 These new features were introduced in order to compete with other services such as Compete.com and Quantcast.25 Despite these changes many in the web marketing community still question the relevance of Alexa's information and its accuracy.2627 Trackware/Adware Symantec classifies the toolbar as trackware.28 McAfee classifies it as adware a "Potentially Unwanted Program."29 McAfee Site Advisor rates the Alexa website as "green" finding "no significant problems" albeit a "small fraction of downloads...that some people consider adware or other potentially unwanted programs."30 See also Compete.com List of search engines List of web directories References a b "About Alexa Internet". http://www.alexa.com/company. Retrieved 2009-10-09.  "ALEXA Internet Donates Archive of the World Wide Web To Library of Congress". Alexa press release. 1998-10-13. http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/1998/98-167.html. Retrieved 2009-10-09.  a b "A "Gift of the Web" for the Library of Congress from Alexa Internet". 1998-10-19. http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbreader.aspArticleID17893. Retrieved 2009-10-19.  Dawson Keith (1997-07-28). "Alexa Internet opens the doors". http://www.tbtf.com/archive/1997-07-28.html. Retrieved 2009-10-09.  "Internet Archive FAQs". http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php. Retrieved 2009-10-09.  Adam Feuerstein (1999-05-21). "E-commerce loves Street: Critical Path plans encore". http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/1999/05/24/newscolumn4.html.  Elizabeth Montalbano (2006-05-01). "Amazon dumps Google for Windows Live". http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/01/77974HNgoogledumped1.html.  Amit Agarwal (2007-05-06). "Alexa Traffic Charts Now Include Advertising". http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/05/alexa-traffic-charts-now-include.html. Retrieved 2007-05-21.  "Northern California District Federal court Case number - C 07-01715 RS" (PDF). http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/z/200701/showcasedoc-1.pdf. Retrieved 2007-04-19.  Alan Graham (2007-04-18). "Amazon sues Alexaholic...everyone loses!". http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/p350. Retrieved 2007-04-19.  Tim O'Reilly (2007-04-20). "Amazon Sues Alexaholic...Everyone Loses". http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/amazonsuesale.html. Retrieved 2007-04-20.  Pete Cashmore (2007-04-19). "Amazon sues Statsaholic...Web as Platform is Bullsh*t". http://mashable.com/2007/04/19/amazon-sues-alexaholic%e2%80%a6web-as-platform-is-bullsht. Retrieved 2007-04-20.  "Alexa Web Search - Help". http://www.alexa.com/site/help/index129. Retrieved 2008-07-05. dead link Cook John (2008-11-27). "Amazon pulling plug on Alexa Web Search". http://www.techflash.com/ReportAmazonpulllingplugonAlexaWebSearch35187569.html. Retrieved 2008-11-27.  Alexa.com a b Harold Davis Google advertising tools O'Reilly Media 2006 ISBN 0596101082 p. 12 1 Alexa about ranking system Alexa explanation about ranking system capabilities Alistair Croll Sen Power Complete Web Monitoring O'Reilly Media 2009 ISBN 0596155131 p. 38 Michael Arrington Make Believe Internet Alexa Says YouTube Is Now Bigger Than Google. Alexa Is Useless TechCrunch Alexa Announcementdead link Mack Geoffrey (2009-03-31). "Pardon out dust". http://awis.blogspot.com/2009/03/pardon-our-dust.html. Retrieved 2009-10-09.  Mack Geoffrey (2009-04-14). "More New Alexa Features:Domgraphics Clickstream Search Traffic". http://awis.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-new-alexa-features-demographics.html. Retrieved 2009-10-09.  Tumurcuoglu Herman. "Web Page Rank from Google Alexa Quantcast and Compete.com". http://web.analyticsblog.ca/2010/03/web-page-rank-from-google-alexa-quantcast-and-compete-com/.  "Is Alexa Relevant in 2010". 2010-03-10. http://www.seobook.com/alexa-relevant-2010. Retrieved 2010-03-10.  "Alexa Ranking: Does it matter". 2008-08-31. http://blog.mark8t.com/2008/08/31/alexa-ranking-does-it-matter-to-increase-your-rank/. Retrieved 2010-09-10.  "Trackware. Alexa - Symantec.com". 2007-02-13. http://www.symantec.com/securityresponse/writeup.jspdocid2004-062410-3624-99. Retrieved 2008-07-05.  "Adware-Alexa". 2005-02-23. http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v131087.htm. Retrieved 2008-07-05.  "Alexa.com". September 2007. http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/alexa.com. Retrieved 2008-07-05.  External links Alexa Internet Official site provides Internet top ten v d eCloud computing Clients Browsers  Devices (Netbooks  Tablets  Smartphones)  Operating Systems (Android  iOS  Windows Phone 7  Linux) Applications Google Apps  Microsoft Online  NetSuite  Salesforce Platforms App Engine  Azure  Engine Yard  Force.com  Heroku  MTurk  RightScale  S3  SimpleDB  SQS Infrastructure EC2  Eucalyptus  FlexiScale  GoGrid  Joyent  Nimbus  Rackspace Cloud  Logicworks  VPC Technologies Networking  Security  Datacenters  Cloud storage  Internet  Structured storage  Virtualization  Web Services  Virtual Appliance v d eAmazon.com People Jeff Bezos  Tony Hsieh  Brian McBride  Tom Szkutak  Brian Valentine  Werner Vogels  Gregg Zehr Former: Rick Dalzell  Brian Krueger  Ram Shriram Products and services Websites A9.com  AbeBooks  Alexa Internet  Alexa Toolbar  Amapedia  Askville  CDNOW  China  Diapers.com  Digital Photography Review  Endless.com  Fresh  Internet Movie Database (Box Office Mojo)  Marketplace  Payments  PlanetAll  Shelfari  Wireless  Woot.com  Zappos.com Web services AAWS  AMI  CloudFront  EBS  EC2  FPS  MTurk  RDS  S3  SES  SimpleDB  SQS  VPC Digital Appstore  Audible.com  Cloud Drive  Instant Video  Kindle  Lexcycle  LoveFilm  Mobipocket  MP3  Reflexive Entertainment Technology 1-Click  aStore  Carbonado  Dynamo  Gurupa  Lab126  Obidos Publishing AmazonEncore  AmazonCrossing  Powered by Amazon  Montlake Romance  Thomas & Mercer Investments 43 Things  Amie Street (Songza)  LibraryThing  Sellaband Other Amazon Light  ASIN  Breakthrough Novel Award  Controversies  Fishbowl  Perfect 10 Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc.  Statistically Improbable Phrases  Vine Annual revenue: US$24.5 billion (2009)  Employees: 31200 (2010)  Stock Symbol: NASDAQ: AMZN  Website: Amazon.com