What's The Deal With Alexa? (Part One)
10 Dec 2005, 6:50:26 pm
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
What is Alexa?
Alexa was founded in April 1996 and acquired by Amazon.com in 1999. It provides dynamic data about the Web, including Web site traffic information, statistics, and other tools:
* URL Information - useful data about millions of Web sites, including traffic rank, load speed, related links, site owner contact information, and adult content identification.
* Browse Category - everything that is needed to build a site browse tree, including lists of sub-categories for a top-level category, most popular sites in a category, and all sites within the category.
* Web Search - Web search based on Alexa's crawl, providing robust support for advanced queries allowing developers to construct difficult queries and incorporate the answers into their applications.
* Crawl Meta Data - meta-data for specific pages found in the Alexa Crawl, including size, checksum, frames, images, and links.
* Web Map - topographic representation of Alexa's Web crawl displaying all links in and links out of specific pages on the Web.
How it works:
Every two months Alexa's crawlers go out and scour the web bringing down 100 Terabytes of Web content and over 4 billion URLs into the archive. By partnering with Google, Alexa has built a new kind of search engine, one that helps users collaborate and find the best sites, with less effort. Sites include e-commerce sites, blogs, news sites and more. Along with crawling, Alexa uses information gathered from folks who use the Alexa Toolbars.
Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period.
Rankings are based on a combined measure of reach (the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day) and pageviews (the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site - multiple visits to a URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview). The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1. (Note: On Alexa, the lower the ranking number, the better or more powerful the site - so a #1 ranking is the #1 website.)
Alexa's traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). They not provide separate rankings for subpages (e.g. www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com) unless, as with Geocities and Tripod homepages, Alexa has made special arrangements.
Using the crawlers, & the data from Alexa Toolbars, the data is organized into useful categories of information.
One of the reasons it is disliked (in fact hated by me early on!) is that, as you can see, much of the Alexa data is received by it's toolbar users. And it's a fact that there is a disproportionate number of Asian users. Alexa itself puts it this way:
"The rate of adoption of Alexa software in different parts of the world may vary widely due to advertising locality, language, and other geographic and cultural factors. For example, Korean sites are prominent among our top-ranked sites, but it is unknown to what extent this reflects high rates of general Internet usage in Korea."
This, of course, leads to skewed information. However, as you will see in later articles, Alexa is not to be ignored...
[an error occurred while processing this directive] Back To List
|