Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We will be retiring Alexa.com

support.alexa.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 254 posts

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#41

Post by judge2020 »

Retric wrote: post #23
oblio wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short, international, neutral name, somewhat easy to pronounce in many languages.

It’s also been a popular name for decades, http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Alexa-name-popularity.html . IMO, picking one of the most common US names for a voice assistant and then skipping the wake up phrase is dumb.

> one of the most common US names

With ~125k total names since the 1940's, it's not really close to one of the most common in the US; just one that was in the top 100 for 2 decades.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#42

Post by afavour »

Retric wrote: post #23
oblio wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short, international, neutral name, somewhat easy to pronounce in many languages.

It’s also been a popular name for decades, http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Alexa-name-popularity.html . IMO, picking one of the most common US names for a voice assistant and then skipping the wake up phrase is dumb.

Yeah I have a friend called Alexa and it absolutely infuriates her. Can't say I blame her.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#43

Post by jaimie »

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

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#44

Post by jlelse »

speedgoose wrote: post #21
Trung0246 wrote: post #3

Is there an anternative to the ranking? I don't know if sucs thing exist since everywhere I saw people keep mentioning alexa ranking...

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/

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#45

Post by jen729w »

gumby wrote: post #38
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".

My watch’s Siri seems to trigger when washing my hands, or sometimes when I am in the kitchen and somebody else opens the tap. I was on a zoom call the other day, both of us using speaker (no headsets) and something trigger both our watches to say, “sorry, I didn’t get that”, in each of our languages. At least we both laughed.

Mine too, but I think you’re probably holding down the crown in the physical action of the washing. Your hands are bent in unusual ways and the back of your hand pushes up against the crown.

I don’t think it’s responding to a vocal ‘Hey, Siri!’ in this case.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#46

Post by dredmorbius »

renewiltord wrote: post #31
dredmorbius wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah. Probably my router's adblock. I can resolve the host directly querying 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 resolvers. Not broken so much as working as configured ;-)

Cool, makes sense. Here's a tool you can use to verify that it's not your system that's stopping the request https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/

I actually verified by running dig locally, but thanks.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#47

Post by dougmwne »

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.

I would like to briefly visit your reality.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#48

Post by Uehreka »

smarx007 wrote: post #24
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…

How does Alexa work? It seems to me it’s hard for anyone except Google Analytics or Cloudflare to build such a service.

Google Analytics would only work on sites that run Google Analytics, which would exclude sites run by the other big tech companies. Alexa worked because their toolbar addon would record every site their users went to, regardless of what was running on the site.

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#49

Post by speedgoose »

jlelse wrote: post #44
speedgoose wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

My bad, it's pretty good. (except the map, which is very much this https://xkcd.com/1138/ )

Re: We will be retiring Alexa.com

#50

Post by skarz »

smarx007 wrote: post #24
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…

How does Alexa work? It seems to me it’s hard for anyone except Google Analytics or Cloudflare to build such a service.

I remember vaguely that they got their metrics from a browser toolbar.
Post reply on HN