1996–1999 Alexa Internet was founded in April 1996 by
Brewster Kahle and
Bruce Gilliat. The company's name was chosen in homage to the
Library of Alexandria in
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. Alexa initially offered a toolbar that gave Internet users suggestions on where to go next based on the traffic patterns of its user community. The company 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 operations grew to include the archiving of web pages as they are
"crawled" and examined by an automated computer program (nicknamed a "bot" or "web crawler"). 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, two
terabytes in size, to the
Library of Congress.
2000–2009 Alexa began a partnership with
Google in early 2002 and with the web directory
DMOZ in January 2003. 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 servers or elsewhere. In May 2006, Google was replaced by
Windows Live Search as a provider of search results. In December 2006, Amazon released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it was the first major application built on the company's Web platform. In May 2007, Alexa changed their API to limit comparisons to three websites, reduce the size of embedded graphs in
Flash, and add mandatory embedded BritePic advertisements. In April 2007, the company filed a lawsuit,
Alexa v. Hornbaker, to stop
trademark infringement by the Statsaholic service. In the lawsuit, Alexa alleged that Ron 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 had removed the term
Alexa from his service name on March 19, 2007. On November 27, 2008, Amazon announced that Alexa Web Search was no longer accepting new customers and that the service would be deprecated or discontinued for existing customers on January 26, 2009. Thereafter, Alexa became a purely analytics-focused company. On March 31, 2009, Alexa revealed a major website redesign. The redesigned site provided new web traffic metrics, including average page views per individual user,
bounce rate (the rate of users who come to and then leave a webpage), and user time on the
website. In the following weeks, Alexa added more features, including visitor demographics,
clickstream, and web search traffic statistics.
2010–2020 During this period, Alexa's algorithm had been evolving along with it. Statistics projection and the use of their technology associated with a large network of certificated websites allowed them to keep ahead of the website traffic metrics around the world. Because of this, many large sites were using it as the main reference for popularity on the internet. On November 6, 2014, Amazon announced
Amazon Alexa, their
virtual assistant. Amazon already had trademarks for
Alexa due to their ownership of Alexa Internet, Inc.
End of service On December 8, 2021, Amazon announced the cessation of its website ranking and competitive analysis service, which had been available to the public for more than 25 years. From that day on, it was no longer possible to create accounts or buy subscriptions on the service. The statement first published on its website specified the total cessation of the service as of May 1, 2022. Existing subscriptions were available until that date, after which everything on the site was removed and replaced with an "End of Service Notice". The alexa.com domain is now a landing page for
Amazon Alexa products. == Alexa Traffic Rank ==