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We will be retiring Alexa.com

support.alexa.com

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Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#211

Post by Thorrez »

cobrabyte wrote: post #5

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.

They don't need to shutter the company to reuse the domain. They could have moved the company to alexarank.com .

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#212

Post by Thorrez »

barbazoo wrote: post #121
cobrabyte wrote: post #5

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.

I'm pretty sure they were interested in the company as a product.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#213

Post by dotancohen »

lgats wrote: post #29
ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #14

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…

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.

This is a terrific tool, thank you. Bookmarking for reference.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#214

Post by cookiengineer »

betamaxthetape wrote: post #149
jaimie wrote: post #43

Interestingly, Alexa was founded by Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive contemporaneously (both in 1996). Interesting flow of ideas between the two projects - one to figure out what is getting traffic (commercial) and one to figure out how to preserve it (non-profit). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle

It seems that the flow has reduced somewhat in recent months: Alexa haven't been providing crawl data to the Internet Archive since January 2021. (You can see this by looking at the "Items" graph on the Alexa Crawls collection [0]) [0] https://archive.org/details/alexacrawls?tab=about

I was digging through their entries, this is the latest scrape that I could find. Haven't successfully unpacked anything yet, but it seems to be legit [1].

[1] https://archive.org/download/alexa20200802-00

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#215

Post by skinkestek »

ravenstine wrote: post #52

Are there any alternatives? I enjoy watching the long-term decline of the websites of former employers I don't like.

I have an ex boss who at some time told me he used to look up names of ex employees to verify that none of them earned more after they left that company

He paid decently, true, but givrn the way things developed (he had a couple of seriously toxic senior engineers) I'm happy to say that I went to 20-40% (depending on how you look at bonuses, in Norway that is a lot anyway) higher salary in my next job and have kept getting raises since :-)

Now the two problems have departed, he wanted me back twice and I wanted to go back but he couldn't afford my current price.

Sad for both parts.

Edit: in Norway taxable salary and taxable wealth used to be publicly available.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#216

Post by nafey »

skinkestek wrote: post #215
ravenstine wrote: post #52

Are there any alternatives? I enjoy watching the long-term decline of the websites of former employers I don't like.

I have an ex boss who at some time told me he used to look up names of ex employees to verify that none of them earned more after they left that company He paid decently, true, but givrn the way things developed (he had a couple of seriously toxic senior engineers) I'm happy to say that I went to 20-40% (depending on how you look at bonuses, in Norway that is a lot anyway) higher salary in my next job and have kept g…

Used to be? Is it no longer public?

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#217

Post by Closi »

CSSer wrote: post #129
bentcorner wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's been forever since I've seen this first hand, but iirc apple.com and microsoft.com are both default homepages in Safari on macOS and Edge on Windows, respectively. That may artificially inflate the numbers a bit too.

That’s a good point. Both companies also offer single sign on services too so again maybe that could keep redirecting users back to their sites.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#218

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

bentcorner wrote: post #123
lgats wrote: 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.

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?

Think docs.Microsoft.com etc - some people spend all day every day on there!

I spend quite a lot of time looking at new MacBooks :)

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#219

Post by Langdal »

nafey wrote: post #216
skinkestek wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an ex boss who at some time told me he used to look up names of ex employees to verify that none of them earned more after they left that company He paid decently, true, but givrn the way things developed (he had a couple of seriously toxic senior engineers) I'm happy to say that I went to 20-40% (depending on how you look at bonuses, in Norway that is a lot anyway) higher salary in my next job and have kept g…

Used to be? Is it no longer public?

It's still public, but now it is behind a login, and people can see who has looked at their tax info.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#220

Post by thatwasunusual »

nafey wrote: post #216
skinkestek wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an ex boss who at some time told me he used to look up names of ex employees to verify that none of them earned more after they left that company He paid decently, true, but givrn the way things developed (he had a couple of seriously toxic senior engineers) I'm happy to say that I went to 20-40% (depending on how you look at bonuses, in Norway that is a lot anyway) higher salary in my next job and have kept g…

Used to be? Is it no longer public?

It's semi-public.

Previously, up until 2010-ish?, newspapers etc. could ask for the public tax records from the government and make them searchable.

Now that's not possible, but they are free to list the 10-50-100 richest people in each municipality, the sports people earning the most, the business mean with the highest wealth or lowest tax etc.

Everyone can still look up individuals, though, but they have to log in to a government portal to do it, _and_ the individual being looked up will be notified about it, and who did it.

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