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Alexa, Amazon's Most Flawed Idea
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Oct 19, 2006 11:19 AM
from the ain't-that-the-truth dept.
from the ain't-that-the-truth dept.
Rub3X writes "The Alexa ranking system is naturally flawed. The data should never be treated as accurate, as it's easily manipulated, and not supported for most browsers in the world. It's an estimate, and nothing more.
" I've been saying that forever, but unfortunately for me, since it's a number on a website that is considered "Real" to some, I'm supposed to take it seriously. I imagine this is a problem for many webmasters out there.
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File Upload Sites & their ranking (Score:5, Informative)
That explains why Alexa has file-upload sites such as Megaupload,rapidshare in the top 10 sites of most countries...
Error in article (Score:4, Insightful)
"Alexa has no support for FireFox, Opera or Safari at all. "
According to Alexa's Wiki:
"Users running any browser except Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are not represented. Thus users of Opera, Safari, mobile phone (WAP) browsers are all ignored. Nevertheless, this is still the vast majority of the browser market."
So its half right
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That's the other problem with Alexa. It doesn't include clueful users. Of course, they aren't statistically significant.
The data shows there are problems (Score:5, Interesting)
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www.stevecastle.org [stevecastle.org]
Just askin'...
Re:The data shows there are problems (Score:5, Interesting)
If so, it kind of makes the case that Alexa data is less than useful.
But that's not all that's going on. In Nov-Dec 2005 it shows Slashdot's traffic roughly tripling, then settling down to roughly double its previous level, in the space of about a month. I have our traffic logs from that time. They were basically flat. All of the variance was Alexa anomalies.
Parent
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Re:The data shows there are problems (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not "less than useful".
In fact, this is both a completely obvious and a completely stupid article submission. The "duh" tag is appropriate, both because none of the current ranking/statistics systems are accurate, and because despite that, they are still useful.
When you're looking at numbers like total reach, or you're comparing one web site with another, nobody needs statistics that are 100% accurate. I don't need to know if CNN has 4 million unique visitors per day or 4,409,765 unique visitors per day. You're using these services to get a general idea. If I'm running a web site, for example, I know what my own stats are - I don't need Alexa to tell me. But I can still use Alexa to tell me the basic gist of a competitor, and if they're not as accurate as internal stats would be, what does that matter?
Moreover, Alexa's stats are no more or less accurate (or easy to manipulate) than those of major organizations like Nielsen. The fact of the matter is any system that's not using actual server logs is going to have some inaccuracies (and if you think otherwise, then you've just bought into marketing spin). You live with it and accept it. The main difference is that Alexa is free, whereas other stat compilers charge thousands of dollars per year.
Parent
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Honestly Alexa must know it's a big joke. It still annoying to see it given any relevance.
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As for Digg taking over Slashdot... well, maybe there are less punks on Digg. That would make me switch. Other than the punk factor, it must just be viral marketing.
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At least on
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I have work to do, and 2 slashdot-like distractions would put me out of business!
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Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
The people that matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Until advertisers "get it" or a much more accurate public metric is made available, Alexa rankings will unfortunately matter to web sites that are supported by advertising.
masked domains (Score:2)
I have a blogger blog that is masked with my own domain name.
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I don't know, but off the top of my head I doubt page-ranking services would count other sites loaded in an IFrame. Otherwise I could create one of those useless domain-squatting pages that just exist to throw ads at people who click or type wrongly, load a bunch of actually useful, respected sites in IFrames, and use all that content
Ditt what Taco said (Score:2)
Best source is the source - i.e. would be real interesting to know what the web stats (for actual web logs) are like for a site like
Let's talk about this "most" thing (Score:2)
You heard it here first, folks: IE and Firefox make up only a small minority of web browsers in use.
Star-based rating systems are useless for more than getting a quick idea of what's up. They don't really tell you anything; for instance, I've purchased items in the past that have issues that don't bother me that I would have passed on just based on a "star" approach.
This goes for Alexa, this goes for movies, etc. I suspect that most consumers of this
Another reason to dislike Alexa (Score:2, Insightful)
Useless or Used Wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
This suggests it is useless as a way to estimate how much to pay for advertising on a web site (though since this is usually per click/per display I don't see why ranking matters here). However, it doesn't show that this data can't be usefull for other things. For instance it could be quite usefull to know what other sites the users (or IE users) of a site visit.
In other words the data seems useless for any statistical analysis but it could be quite helpful to know what sorts of users visit a site. Sure slashdot's traffic might be underrepresented but I bet you the data still show that slashdot users are quite likely to go browse gadget purchase sites or programming related sites. If you want to know where to advertise your new fancy gadget or a fancy new programming enviornment that would be very usefull information even if it wouldn't support a rigorous statistical analysis.
High end advertising (Score:3, Interesting)
However, the big boys (Ford Motor Company, Warner Bros. Television, etc.) focus on brand building and budgets. They don't ask if they are making money off the impressions, they have a quar
BZZT. (Score:5, Insightful)
SearchStatus and skewing results in your favor (Score:2)
Real? (Score:3, Funny)
That's not real, that's int.
don't see the point (Score:3, Insightful)
What impetus or benefit would a user have to install a toolbar that tracks them? Other than out of charity to help out this company? I don't get it. Nor do I particularly trust them. Just one more thing to help crash IE.
WTF is Alexa? (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF IS ALEXA?
Another case of "I don't want to waste 30 seconds to explain WTF the news is about, let 50K users waste a few minutes and slashdot a website trying to figure out what it is".
Polling data in general (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia editors constantly need to be smacked (Score:4, Interesting)
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MOST flawed? Oh no. (Score:2)
Nothing's perfect, but it's not worthless (Score:2)
The problem: Lack of trust (Score:2, Interesting)
All that changed when Alexa was bought by Amazon. And then the truth came out -- all the information that I thought was private was in the database, and now owned by a commercial company, with
The only flaw is taking alexa seriously (Score:2)
I do use alexa to measure the relative worth of my sites vs competitors. The data never conicides with my own analytics against referral logs and that's ok. Alexa sucks like that.
Google or Yahoo could create a better web ranking (Score:3, Interesting)
What is the reason for web stats? If you're paying per view or per click then the information is directly available.
This leads to an interesting possibility. The ad providers could provide a ranking of sites based on the number of adds that they show there and the number of clicks that are created. This is, of course, open to manipulation via click fraud and other techniques but it would probably be more accurate than Alexa's rankings.
Then, if you wanted to improve this even more you could combine this with the number of searches that go to a page. A large net firm that provided these services could do such a ranking. Google or Yahoo could do this. Perhaps they do, for their internal consumption.
Yeah and MOST for slashdot is not IE (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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You'd like to think so, but I'd bet that there'd be not a few wannabe types who talk the Linux talk but haven't the cajones to walk the walk. I've known many people in my time who were often vaunted for their supposed computer literacy, and who would often sing Linux's praises whilst bashing Windows, but when it came to installing it on their own systems, it was a different story. Partitioning too scary I suppose.
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Why not. Say I have a site about changing from Windows to Linux, I would imagine that the majority of people would be Windows users. If not, I would have missed my target group.
Re:slashdot & alexa (Score:2)
So a corollary of that would mean that,higher the number in Alexa, higher the number of 'lame' users of a website who actually installed a Alexa toolbar.
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1. "browsers" refers to software. Incorrect, as you pointed out.
2. "browsers" refers to the people using the software to browse. Valid, and accurate. Alexa isn't supported for most users (could be and sometimes are called "browsers") in the world.
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If you're talking about "browser instances" or "browser installations," then it would be incorrect.
"...not supported for most browsers in the world."
Assume there are 100 actively developed browsers in the world (there are probably many more, but for the sake of argument). IE is 1 browser. That would make "other browsers" 99% of all browsers in the world, a
Re:But is supported for the #1 browser (Score:5, Insightful)
You can pull accurate statistics if and only if your data points are distributed correctly. Because Alexa has no way to randomly and accurately assign toolbars to users, their data is not reliable in any form.
A similar example is how political polls are taken. You can get accurate numbers with 1,000 adults if, and only if, those 1,000 are random throughout the entire population. You can skew the poll numbers by polling 1,000 Democrats or Republicans only instead of 1,000 random. Your results are only accurate to your surveyed population -- in Alexa's case, their numbers are only accurate so far as "Rank ### amongst Internet Explorer 6.0 users who speak a limited number of languages who have voluntarily installed our toolbar to submit their surfing habits to us for analysis and are subjected to trade secret methods of ranking".
The only way that you could pull accurate numbers would be through all ISPs selecting random data points to find what hostnames people were using. It would have to be filtered, though, to produce accurate numbers in terms of actual "website hits" instead of just "website requests". Keep-alive would further impede accurate results. As would proxies, DNS caches, and HOSTS files.
Parent
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What a great line! I'm going to steal it for next week's meetings.
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Google has it's own system for determining the importance of a page - and while it's still flawed, and only really geared towards their own goals, it does a good job of showing the importance of a website.
Google has more than that, actually. It has a pretty good idea of traffic patterns for any sites that use its free Google Analytics [google.com] visitor/hit tracking software.
I wonder if that data gets factored into the page rank at all... probably not, at least not yet, but I imagine such information could be used
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