Live data from Hacker News

We will be retiring Alexa.com

support.alexa.com

91–100 of 254 posts

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#91
post #8

It's sort of wild to think that Amazon purchased Alexa.com in 1999 for ~$250M in stock, and that stock would be worth more than $7B today, if my math is correct. Bought a website ranking company, used the company's name as the name of a consumer electronics assistant, and then shuttered the company 22 years later to (presumably) be able to use the domain name for more consumer electronics.

In essense, what the original Alexa did seems to have been internalized into Amazon ads (or their b2b analytics division), which is coincidently the fastest growing part of Amazon. Wonder why they used the Alexa name for their home assistant.

>Early on, the team realized they needed a "wake word" that would make the device start listening. The word would need to have three syllables, a "distinct combination of phonemes" so as not to unnecessarily rouse the device, and an easily marketable name, like Apple's Siri.

https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/here-are-the-other-name...

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#93
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've loaded in Alexa, Majestic, Cisco DNS, and Tranco rankings into this site: https://domain.glass/ycombinator.com#dns_rank Not the prettiest, but I use it a fair amount myself for researching domains.

TIL about https://bookface.ycombinator.com/

I’m perplexed about “ whoredom.groups.ycombinator.com” ? From grandparents link

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#95

Wow, that is a bummer! Alexa is my go-to place to get a first impression on how much traffic a website gets. I have never looked into how they get their data, I always assumed they get it from internet providers? Is there an alternative? SimilarWeb publishes their data with a huge delay, so it is not of much use for me. From my experience, it is also less reliable. It is crazy how valuable internet properties get clo…

How fondly people remember a company that totally installed tracking software into browser add-ons.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#96
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of the most common US names With ~125k total names since the 1940's, it's not really close to one of the most common in the US; just one that was in the top 100 for 2 decades.

I'd say top 100 for about the last 25 years makes it pretty common. What surprises me a bit is that it didn't fall off a cliff after Amazon's Alexa came out.

"Alexa" seems to have fallen of a cliff since Amazon's device, though. If this site is accurate: https://nameberry.com/babyname/Alexa

"Alexandra" seems way more common than "Alexa".

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#98
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also been a popular name for decades, http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Alexa-name-popularity.html . IMO, picking one of the most common US names for a voice assistant and then skipping the wake up phrase is dumb.

I know it's not perfect, but if you use Amazon's Alexa and know an Alexa you can change the wake phrase to a few others (iirc "echo" and "amazon" are among the choices).

It’s not just a question of being a friend or family members name name. It’s also easy for a YouTube video etc to accidentally include say “Alexia turn off the lights” as part of seemingly innocent dialog that nobody building it thinks is going to cause a problem.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#100
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 must provide great data. It's not publicly available though. https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/privacy/public-dns... (CloudFlare stores aggregated data) https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy (well, it's Google)

Cloudflare has Radar: https://radar.cloudflare.com/

Interesting how Tiktok is so high (#1).
Post reply on HN