About Alexa

About Alexa Internet

Founded in April 1996, Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of intelligent Web navigation constantly improving through its users. Since then, our Alexa users have downloaded millions of Toolbars, and Alexa has created one of the largest Web crawls, and developed the infrastructure to process and serve massive amounts of data.

For users of the Alexa Toolbar and our website, the results are products that have revolutionized Web navigation and intelligence. For developers, this has led to a set of tools unprecedented in scope, allowing whole new services to be created with Alexa data.

Alexa Products and Services

Alexa Toolbar

Alexa could not exist without the participation of the Alexa Toolbar community. Each member of the community, in addition to getting a useful tool, is giving back. Simply by using the toolbar each member contributes valuable information about the web, how it is used, what is important and what is not. This information is returned to the community as Related Links, Traffic Rankings and more.

Want to help? Install the Alexa Toolbar, and tell your friends. The more people use Alexa, the more useful it will be.

Alexa.com

Alexa's website is built on the principle that timely and relevant information is essential to a vital web experience.

Alexa Site Info - Alexa has built an unparalleled database of information about sites, including statistics, Related Links, and more. All of this information can be found on Alexa's Site Info pages. Just type the URL of any site into the Alexa search box and click the "Search" button.

Alexa Top Sites - Alexa has lists of Top Sites available by country, language or in a category. You can download a free file of the global top million sites sorted by Alexa Traffic Rank.

Alexa Site Audit - Alexa will crawl and analyze your website to give you an in-depth view of your site's visibility to search engines, and provide insights into the optimization, monetization and overall health of your site. Learn more.

Site Tools

Alexa has created a series of tools specifically for web site owners. These tools can help to drive traffic, make money, find broken links and more! Go to Site Tools.

Alexa Web Services

In November 2005, Alexa released the Alexa Web Information Service on the Amazon.com Web Services platform. Gain access to Alexa's processed information about the Web, including traffic statistics, Related Links, and more. See Alexa Web Services on Amazon.com.

Alexa Web Rank

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and website. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the website where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company's Web traffic reporting. Alexa claims that 6 million people visit its website monthly.

Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. The company's name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria,^[drawing a parallel between the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world to the potential for the Internet to emulate its depth.

The company offered a toolbar that gave Internet users suggestions on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community. Alexa also 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's operation includes archiving of webpages as they are crawled. This database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive accessible through the Wayback Machine In 1998 the company donated a copy of the archive, 2 terabytes in size, to the Library of Congress. Alexa continues to supply the Internet Archive with Web crawls.

In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about US$250 million in Amazon stock as the company moved away from its original vision of providing an "intelligent" search engine. Alexa began a partnership with Google in early 2002, and with the Open Directory Project in January 2003. In May 2006, Amazon replaced Google with Live Search as a provider of search results. In September 2006, they began using their own Search Platform to serve results. In December 2006, they released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it is the first major application to be built on their Web Platform.

In December 2005, Alexa opened its extensive search index and Web-crawling facilities to third party programs through a comprehensive set of Web services and APIs. These could be used, for instance, to construct vertical search engines that could run on Alexa's own servers or elsewhere. In May 2007, Alexa changed their API to require comparisons be limited to three sites, reduced size embedded graphs be shown using Flash, and mandatory embedded BritePic ads.

In April 2007, the lawsuit Alexa v. Hornbaker was filed to stop trademark infringement by the Statsaholic service.  In the lawsuit, Alexa alleged that Hornbaker was stealing traffic graphs for profit, and that the primary purpose of his site was to display graphs that were generated by Alexa's servers. Hornbaker removed the term Alexa from his service name on March 19, 2007. Nevertheless, Alexa expressly grants permission to refer its data in third-party work subject to suitable credits.

On November 27, 2008, Amazon announced that Alexa Web Search was no longer accepting new customers, and the service would be deprecated or discontinued for existing customers on January 26, 2009.