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We will be retiring Alexa.com

support.alexa.com

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Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#113
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.

This just struck me, and I don't know if it's true, but a-lex could be a play on Greek and Latin for "not" and "written." Which is a pretty good name for a voice-based input system.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#115
It was a bad idea 25 years ago, and still its a bad idea. I will never forget the day our company fired two brilliant marketing guys just because the Alexa ranking of the site dropped 100 points.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#116

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…

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Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#117

It was a bad idea 25 years ago, and still its a bad idea. I will never forget the day our company fired two brilliant marketing guys just because the Alexa ranking of the site dropped 100 points.

The issue is not that Alexa is a bad idea. The issue is your company has bad ideas.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#119
post #77
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I have a friend called Alexa and it absolutely infuriates her. Can't say I blame her.

At least you can change the wake word on Amazon devices All Apple devices interpret "Hey Sarah" as "Hey Siri" and then start shooting their stupid mouths off, bugs the hell out of Sarah

I have 2 home pod mini's, a homepod, an iphone and ipad and i just said "hey sarah" 5 times in different ways and I got no response.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#120
Tranco[0] was already mentioned by another comment, but I recommend reading their paper[1] to see how these lists are created, and how they can be manipulated (paper covers Alexa, Cisco Umbrella, Majestic Million, and Quantcast).

From the introduction summary: "e.g. only one HTTP request suffices to enter the widely used Alexa top million. We empirically validate that reaching a rank as good as 28 798 is easily achieved."

[0]: https://tranco-list.eu/

[1]: https://tranco-list.eu/assets/tranco-ndss19.pdf

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