Alexa Internet

Alexa is a server service that collects data about web page accesses by web users and represents. The company operating Alexa Internet Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.com.

Alexa was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat and taken over in 1999 by Amazon.com for 250 million U.S. dollars.

History

" Alexa was designed as a guide through the Internet. [ ... ] We wanted to catalog the web. [ Users ] should know where they are located, and proposed, which pages they might visit next. This was the concept of the company basically to display for each website visited related links. "

Initially, Alexa Internet was merely a toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Later, the toolbar also available for other web browsers and their functions with the summarized a search engine. The focus is to evaluate the quality, traffic and links a particular website. Today, this toolbar is distributed mainly in the English-speaking cultural area.

Alexa Internet sites to find out the nature of their selection in the sense of whether they are selected directly or through similar pages. Here, Alexa Internet does not act as a search engine in the strict sense, but rather as a database that lists pages that have a relationship with the site you are visiting, that are topically similar. For this purpose, Alexa Internet is also evaluating the data of the Open Directory Project.

Alexa Rank

The Alexa rank the identified traffic are evaluated and determined in this way the 1,000,000 most visited domains.

The Alexa Rank is very interesting for advertisers websites since a high rank indicates ( approximately less than 50,000 ) to a presumably large popularity of a page. For this reason, it was and is very often trying to manipulate the ranking. One possibility was to Alexa forwarding. About this forwarding it was supposedly possible to improve the rank of a page. To this end, a visitor to a website was first passed to a server by Alexa before he was then referred to his actual goal. Whether this possibility actually worked, is controversial. Nevertheless, Alexa has this reference in January 2008 disabled. Further manipulations are eg via JavaScript realized. Either by appropriately programmed websites or through browser extensions (eg Greasemonkey for Internet Browser Firefox). Conceivable multiple, parallel virtual machines that call with a changing IP address of the respective Internet pages at random and therefore high traffic ( inter alia page impressions per visitor, length of stay per visitor, bounce rate ) are generated. In this case, the Alexa Rank is not exclusive target of manipulation. By having good rank the site receives more backlinks, which the positioning in the SERPs (search engine ranking ) on the other search engines is improved.

Due to the system of rank is already at this point no longer representative and error prone. Next detrimental to the validity of the Alexa rank is the effect of the fact that only the information included in the evaluation of websites which are collected by the automated monitoring of the users of the toolbar. It is a non-representative sample. Due to the lack of sample overestimated Alexa the real scope of specific sites by a factor of 50; this, the Google researchers Norvig after a sample analysis.

Privacy concerns

The state commissioner for data protection Bremen lists the toolbar as privacy infringing software (spyware) that transmits the Server service information on the Internet use of Web users, and published a guide on how you can protect yourself against this activity. The toolbar was offered unsuspecting PC users in large numbers as a supposedly helpful software or during the installation of other programs.

In particular, sites with an interested audience to privacy are likely to be under-represented, similar to the high proportion of open source users on technical aspects such as H or Slashdot.