17 Facts About Alexa Internet

Alexa Internet, Inc was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco.

Alexa Internet was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock.

Alexa Internet provided web traffic data, global rankings, and other information on over 30 million websites.

Alexa Internet was founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat.

Alexa Internet's name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria of Ptolemaic Egypt, drawing a parallel between the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world and the potential of the Internet to become a similar store of knowledge.

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Alexa Internet 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.

Alexa Internet's operations grew to include archiving of web pages as they are "crawled" and examined by an automated computer program .

Alexa Internet began a partnership with Google in early 2002, and with the web directory DMOZ in January 2003.

In December 2005, Alexa Internet opened its extensive search index and Web-crawling facilities to third-party programs through a comprehensive set of Web services and APIs.

In May 2007, Alexa Internet changed their API to limit comparisons to three websites, reduce the size of embedded graphs in Flash, and add mandatory embedded BritePic advertisements.

Key metric published from Alexa Internet analytics was the Alexa Traffic Rank, simply known as Alexa Rank.

The Alexa Internet Toolbar included a popup blocker, a search box, links to Amazon.

In early 2005, Alexa Internet stated that there had been 10 million downloads of the toolbar, though the company did not provide statistics about active usage.

Originally, web pages were only ranked amongst users who had the Alexa Internet Toolbar installed, and could be biased if a specific audience subgroup was reluctant to take part in the rankings.

In 2007, Michael Arrington provided examples of Alexa Internet rankings known to contradict data from the comScore web analytics service, including ranking YouTube ahead of Google.

Alexa Internet confirmed this later in the day with an announcement that they had released an updated ranking system, claiming that they would now take into account more sources of data "beyond Alexa Internet Toolbar users".

Site owners input JavaScript code on each page of their website that, if permitted by the user's security and privacy settings, ran and sent traffic data to Alexa Internet, allowing Alexa Internet to display—or not display, depending on the owner's preference—more accurate statistics such as total page views and unique page views.