Alexa Internet
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Alexa Internet is California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com. Its website is best known for providing information on the web traffic to sites in its index. Its premises are in Building 37 of the Presidio of San Francisco.
Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat and backed by Jacqui Safra's Etoile Investments as a commercial offshoot of the Internet Archive, Alexa Internet created related links for users of the Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator web browsers. Engineers at Alexa created the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Alexa also supplies the Internet Archive with web crawls. Other people connected with Alexa Internet prior to its acquisition include: Carl Feynman (consultant), Danny Hillis (board member), and Scott Hassan (founder of eGroups).
Alexa collects information on Web usage through the Alexa Toolbar. This allows them to provide statistics on web site traffic, as well as related link information. The Alexa Toolbar has a bad reputation with anti-spyware programs, as it collects a bit too much information on search habits.
In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about $250 million in Amazon stock. The "site info" link on the Alexa site lists related links for websites and also records how much web traffic they receive. Alexa began a partnership with Google in spring 2002, and with Open Directory in January 2003. Today, Alexa is primarily a Google-based search engine, an Open Directory-based web directory, and a supplier of site information.
Alexa also provides "site info" for the A9.com search engine.
See also
External links
- Alexa Internet (http://www.alexa.com)
- About the Alexa Traffic Rankings (http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/traffic_learn_more.html)
- Alexa rank of wikipedia.org (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3m&size=large&compare_sites=&y=t&url=wikipedia.org)
- The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)
- How Alexa Works (http://www.vmmg.net/vertical-marketing-resources/the_amazing_alexa_toolbar.shtml)de:Alexa Internet