wait since when is Alexa an Amazon's company? Did they buy it just for the domain?
We will be retiring Alexa.com
171–180 of 254 posts
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#172Add it to the Amazon graveyard.
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
If our Google Home triggers accidentally its usually easy to think back on what we said and find the offending phrase. Siri, on the other hand, seems to trigger several times a day without any explanation.
I wonder if the problem is the /s/ sound at the beginning of Siri. Since it's a fricative, it sounds like the hissing noise produced by other kinds of turbulent flow.
It's ok, you can just say "fart".
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#174Wow, 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…
I started a news aggregator that at the peak was ranked in the top ten Alexa sites in a country (was doing 100M page views / month). Alexa was the standard that people would use to judge how successful a site was.... Until people figured out how to massively game it.
For a pretty small sum, you could approach illegal download or porn sites to embed an iframe of your site or do a pop-under ad, and instantly be in the top 10. People aren't actually visiting your site, you're just getting "shadow traffic". Then you'd go tell advertisers "look, we are one of the biggest sites in the country".
We didn't play that game but our competitors did and it was really frustrating.
Anyway, the point is their rankings weren't very reliable (this was 8+ years ago, maybe they've gotten better at detecting traffic fraud).
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#175Wow, 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…
> Alexa is my go-to place [...] I have never looked into how they get their data Right, this is a problem with all sorts of data sources that provide numbers (and use lots of SEO) but don't talk much about their methodology. CelebrityNetWorth is another example of this.
I've come to assume that celebrity net worth sites are mostly just made up numbers. Sometimes you can look up the payout for some specific jobs, but not all, and most of the time, they seem to just ballpark a guess based on that.
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#176anyone remember alexadex, a website stockmarket (using fake money) that took alexa's site rankings as the website's price? so many hours spent...
I ran alexadex! So many hours spent ... :)
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#177Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#178Earlier 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?
how many iDevices and their apps/services ping back home via a *.apple.com domain? In other words, is it possible that the traffic isn't from people visiting the website in a browser?
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#179Earlier 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 just tried this and it didn't happen.
Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com
#180Earlier 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
Yeah I wish I could change the wakeword. I moved to a homepod mini from echo dots for more privacy but it's annoying but being able to change it. I'd prefer one that's one word Iike.
Also bad that it won't check your email etc without an iPhone.. Not very happy with it in general but I love the yellow colour and I trust Apple a bit more for privacy.
One thing that is great is that it matches your own volume. If I ask a question quietly at night Siri responds in a very low volume whereas the echo dot just booms like it's daytime.