We will be retiring Alexa.com • Hacker News Board

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#151

Post by celestialcheese » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

cutenewt wrote: post #126

smt88 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alexa is my go-to place to get a first impression on how much traffic a website gets. Alexa hasn't been a reliable source of traffic data for many years. It's gotten worse as mobile devices, private browsers, VPNs, and tight-fisted companies (like Facebook) have become more widespread. If you own a high-traffic site and check Alexa, it's not even close. One of my sites wasn't in the order of magnitude.

What's the best alternative for website traffic estimates?

SimilarWeb is generally correct - but again, it can be pretty off in some cases. Another one that is sort-of accurate is SEMRush

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#152

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 11:51 PM UTC

kingcharles wrote: post #55

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.

Damn, with that data TikTok.com is ranked #1 O_O

TikTok is big in the Western world, but it's even bigger in China.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#153

Post by StopHammoTime » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 11:51 PM UTC

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.

You gave me my first good giggle of the day today. Oh schadenfreude, how little I knew this (in this context).

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#154

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 11:54 PM UTC

VRay wrote: post #77

afavour wrote: post #42

Earlier 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 asked my Google Assistant if I could call her Siri.

She said "Why? Have I done something wrong? If so, yes this is Siri!"

I'm not even kidding. She's also said "That might get confusing" before or something like that.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#155

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 11:54 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#156

Post by shaunpud » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 11:59 PM UTC

vaporary wrote: post #145

tomwojcik wrote: post #82

If you wish, you can download some of the top 1m records from their s3 curl http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip --output ~/Downloads/alexa.zip Today it contains the top 630779 records.

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/

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#157

Post by yreg » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 12:06 AM UTC

orliesaurus wrote: post #34

A huge piece of the internet is going away: back in the early 2000s I would use Alexa a lot it was a gold mine of information - to the point where some people bragged about their rank on Alexa - that was hilarious, like the modern "twitter followers" / "github stars"

Didn't Wikipedia show Alexa rank in info boxes on articles about websites / internet companies until recently?

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#158

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 12:07 AM UTC

vaporary wrote: post #145

tomwojcik wrote: post #82

If you wish, you can download some of the top 1m records from their s3 curl http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip --output ~/Downloads/alexa.zip Today it contains the top 630779 records.

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

[deleted]

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#159

Post by yreg » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 12:10 AM UTC

bredren wrote: post #37

gandalfian wrote: post #7

It used to be people with the Alexa tool bar were measured to produce a ranking. I wonder how they have been doing it more recently and how accurate it actually was now?

Ya, I think it was originally interesting because it claimed to show google pagerank. There was a tiny measurement bar.

Google Toolbar showed PageRank since 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Toolbar

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#160

Post by kilna » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 12:25 AM UTC

lastofthemojito wrote: post #35

gonehome wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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.

It seems to respond to "OK Goebbels"