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We will be retiring Alexa.com

support.alexa.com

181–190 of 254 posts

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#181

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The nice thing about "OK Google" was that it sounded a lot like "Cocaine Poodle", so you could imagine your personal assistant was a hyperactive creature of limited intelligence. Which honestly, sets expectations appropriately.

I would like to briefly visit your reality.

You can find a dealer at a corner near you X-)

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#182
post #44

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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/

How did openjsf.org get in the top 20? Script includes?

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#183

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It's also phonetically recognizable and distinct. It's one of the reasons you have to say "Hey Google" or "Hey Siri", but you're able to just say "Alexa" I find Siri the worst one for that, it often triggers on "serious".

My “Hey Siri” triggers on the first attempt 25% of the time (neutral North American accent). I wonder if it’s a slow wake-from-sleep issue or something.

It works pretty much 100% here and I have a Dutch accent with Irish influences :) What kind of hardware do you use? Homepod or phone?

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#184

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.

Did they just have extreme foresight about wanting the domain alexa.com or were they genuinely interested in alexa.com as a product? They kept it around for 22 years after all but I can't see how what alexa.com used to do has anything to do with what amazon is doing.

Foresight? Or just picked Alexa because they happened to have the domain and it's a good brand name for this?

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#186

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Does anyone know offhand if past versions of the top 1M are easily accessible? Thanks!

Found some here; https://toplists.net.in.tum.de/archive/alexa/

According to the README in the parent directory, those were downloaded from archive.org. That's brilliant -- it didn't occur to me to check the Wayback Machine for a zip file, but it's totally there: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-...

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#188
post #79

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Ah, that makes sense. I take it that its name is a play on "DoubleClick"?

I've notice some non-native English speakers use "double verify" where native speakers would use "double check" or "verify". It could be a play on that. Or they had a meeting where the founders asked "what domain sounds twice as good as verify.com?"

thats a superplusgood question

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they just have extreme foresight about wanting the domain alexa.com or were they genuinely interested in alexa.com as a product? They kept it around for 22 years after all but I can't see how what alexa.com used to do has anything to do with what amazon is doing.

Foresight? Or just picked Alexa because they happened to have the domain and it's a good brand name for this?

Good point. But then I wonder why they bought it in the first place.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#190
post #175

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> 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.

These website ranking websites like Alexa were also pretty close to ballpark guesses.
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