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We will be retiring Alexa.com

support.alexa.com

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Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#221
post #216

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?

[deleted]

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#222
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?

"Am I on a captive portal?" tests might make up a decent chunk of requests, I believe both Apple and Microsoft have equivalents to http://detectportal.firefox.com/success.txt

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#225

That Amazon kept a site named Alexa with absolutely nothing to do with that Alexa alive for this long is quite impressive.

It seems reusing old product names is their thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software)

Other companies do that, too - I think it's due to trademark law and how it's much harder to establish a new name than reuse an existing one. Cortana comes to mind.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#226

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?

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*

Somewhat over two decades ago, the #1 site in the web cache stats for the web cache between an ISP dialup pool and the internet at large was "icons.hotmail.com" (may have been a number on "icons", actually). With probably 2-3 x the hits than the first porn site.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#227
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I've come to assume that celebrity net worth sites are mostly just made up numbers.

That’s how I increased my net worth to 100 million USD. Now I’m using rolling out an unstable coin trading under the symbol UCCT (UCrayCrayToken) backed by my CelebrityNetWorth.com value. I’m going to burn half the tokens soon, so now is a great time to buy tokens from me before they double in value.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lex is the name of the AWS service that provides NLP based chatbot functionality It is what drives A-lex-a under the hood. https://aws.amazon.com/lex/ In addition it uses another AWS service called Polly that generates speech from text.

You have the order of creation wrong. AWS Lex, Polly, and Transcribe began as forks of Alexa's NLU, TTS (which was an aquisition called Ivona), and ASR components.

Source: I worked for Alexa at the time.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#229
post #83

anyone 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 ... :)

It's incredible that this is your first comment on HN since you created your account in 2012. I'm always amazed when I see this happen.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nah, just bad management.

Ahh. I was thinking of management ideas but I realised product ideas is what most people think of when you hear that sentence.
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