I had some friends who worked at Alexa. I recall they had these bare metal servers down in the basement in these old barracks buildings in the Presidio. I recall being impressed that the whole thing ran on a 1GbE connection. Also was my first introduction to companies that had lots of perks like free food, sitting on Yoga Balls, etc…. I remember they had this raging argument about milk as a condiment versus milk as a beverage. Seemed like a dream to me at the time.
We will be retiring Alexa.com
131–140 of 254 posts
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#132It'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.
Oh, now I’m confused. I thought this was about the Alexa assistant product. Seems from other comments that this company provides web analysis.
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn, with that data TikTok.com is ranked #1 O_O
Also interesting doubleverify.com is ranked 14th, the first I did not hear of. Quickly looked them up, some sort of anti-fraud company, working with TikTok apparently. There website doesn't load for me, I'm wondering if they are target of DDOS attack which might actually move them up the rankings haha
DoubleVerify is an adfraud and brand safety tracker. Basically, they ensure that your ads are displayed to people and not on questionable content if you dont want to. Most agencies and large direct advertisers add this 3rd party to ensure actual humans are seeing the ads, and thus the advertiser is paying for “good” eyeballs instead of “bad”. It’s essentially a 3rd party checking that the ad network doesn’t do anything naughty, which some sites have done in the past.
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#134Are there any alternatives? I enjoy watching the long-term decline of the websites of former employers I don't like.
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#135Is it now hurting their J. Beeps' business or something??!
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#136Earlier 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.
apple.com being so high is (to me) a little counter-intuitive. microsoft.com too for the same reason. They don't seem like the sites people would be using a lot in their day-to-day lives. I guess it's counting dns lookups from devices and not necessarily "human" web page/app requests?
If you’ve worked on or around an enterprise gateway team, you’ll learn pretty quickly that 1) Microsoft, Akamai, Cloudfront and Apple traffic appear to represent 95% of traffic in a given organisation, and 2) providing meaningful reports on internet usage for executives is *hard*
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#137This is a real bummer, I've been using Alexa info for so many years now. It's super useful to get some general views on things across the board.
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Initially, it was mostly by monitoring the traffic of users of the alexa toolbar, https://www.alexa.com/toolbar I think they moved on to more broad data sources, possibly purchasing data from ISPs.
Read between the lines as to how this similar product from Cisco works. http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/umbrella-static/index.html
Thanks! Goodness, only raised more questions:
1. What is Umbrella? See http://info.opendns.com/rs/033-OMP-861/images/OpenDNS-Global...
2. What is Passive DNS? See https://docs.umbrella.com/investigate-ui/docs/passive-dns
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#139Wow, 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 does Alexa work? It seems to me it’s hard for anyone except Google Analytics or Cloudflare to build such a service.
It wouldn't suprise me if they got their metrics out of their arse.
And that would explain the closeure.
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#140Alexa used to be the go to place for first impressions on a website. I hope the engineers are in a better cloud infrastructure.