Founded by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat in 1996, Alexa.com provides a great source of information about internet traffic of different websites, as well as their specific rankings relative to the others. Its birth was due mainly to the vision of the founders to create continually improving web navigation with the participation of its users, so as to eliminate the stress in navigating and finding of information using keyword searches that only gives vague results that are really not what the users need and interest. Its name was derived in honor to the “Library of Alexandria”, the largest repository of information in ancient world. Alexa.com’s vision then resembled this idea, in which it also attempts to maintain and preserve information available in the internet by committing itself to internet archiving.
As soon as you open the site, Alexa.com will give website traffic comparisons of three different sites by means of a line graph, top 10 sites according to various categories and a list of the hottest websites that is updated every five minutes. At the right side corner, it has three categories of traffic rankings-globally, by country and by category. Also, it has a site info search button that will give you an overview about any website with its corresponding statistic over the past few months. Sponsored links are also located here, in addition with the advertisements. Anyone can advertise in Alexa.com by just availing their offers. Alexa.com also provides widgets, toolbars and other services for users to download and avail. Bloggers could also post their opinions and insights about the different websites and used the statistics they gathered in Alexa.com using the Alexa Blog. The website, being neat and clutter-free of any unnecessary advertisements and links didn’t forget to provide its users information about the company itself and help feature that can be visibly seen at first glance.
Since it provides statistics of website, it is evidently a good marketing tool that can be used by website companies to track how their business is doing relative to its competitors. It thus then promote healthy competition among websites so they could enhance their features and services, improving internet convenience. Furthermore, Alexa.com, being user-friendly provides features that can be easily utilized and offers choices that are easily understandable by users, even if it is your first time to use the site.
For some however, using the site is lazy and inaccurate. Inaccurate because Alexa.com gets its information only from those who install their toolbars, which may not be a good sample of the entire internet population – therefore, their statistics may, to some extent, be considered only as an estimate. From their disclaimer, “Generally, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable. Conversely, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its traffic ranking becomes.”
Interesting factoid: Alexa.com does not rank its own website.
