17 Facts About Alexa rank

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

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

Alexa rank estimated website traffic based on a sample of millions of Internet users using browser extensions, as well as from sites that had chosen to install an Alexa rank script.

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

Alexa rank'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.

Related searches

Alexa rank initially offered a toolbar that gave Internet users suggestions on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community.

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

Alexa rank continued to supply the Internet Archive with Web crawls.

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

In December 2005, Alexa rank 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 rank changed their API to limit comparisons to three websites, reduce the size of embedded graphs in Flash, and add mandatory embedded BritePic advertisements.

Alexa used to rank sites based primarily on tracking a sample set of Internet traffic—users of its browser toolbar for the Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers.

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

In early 2005, Alexa rank 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 Toolbar installed, and could be biased if a specific audience subgroup was reluctant to take part in the rankings.

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 rank, allowing Alexa rank to display—or not display, depending on the owner's preference—more accurate statistics such as total page views and unique page views.