Alexa, Amazon's Most Flawed Idea

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.

it's useful on a relative scale

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=&size=large&compare_sites=&y=r&url=ww.com [alexa.com]

not on an absolute scale, but you can compare trends, and if YOU don't fake the data you're ok :)

remove space for link to work

File Upload Sites & their ranking

Services like Megaupload.com force Non-American/Non-european users to install Alexa toolbar to download the file.

That explains why Alexa has file-upload sites such as Megaupload,rapidshare in the top 10 sites of most countries...

Error in article

According to the article:
"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 :P

The data shows there are problems

I've pointed this out before. There are weird statistical anomolies that should show that Alexa's webratings are not perfect. Take a look at this data for Slashdot and Digg. The traffic ratings both shoot up withing a s short amount of time. It just doesn't make much sense. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=2y&size=medium&compare_sites=www.digg.com&y =r&url=www.slashdot.org#top [alexa.com]

Re:The data shows there are problems

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.

Re:The data shows there are problems

f so, it kind of makes the case that Alexa data is less than useful.

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.

But is supported for the #1 browser

Alexa may not be supported by most browsers, but it is supported by The One Browser that most people use and almost everyone has.

Re:But is supported for the #1 browser

It doesn't matter, though, since the distribution of toolbars is not uniform across all Internet users. A good example is the website I work on. We know our traffic, yet Alexa under-reports us. We also know a local competitor's traffic -- both sets of numbers are generally public information that advertisers use. They have a nice site but get about 1/2 of our traffic, yet Alexa over-reports them over us by a factor of 3-4.

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.

Duh

I remember for a while LewRockwell.com, which promoted alexa for its readers, was top-500, beating out worldnetdaily.com and gamefaqs.com. Now, nothing against LewRockwell.com, and it is indeed surprisingly popular, but there's no way in hell it's a top 500 site.

The people that matter

Everyone who owns or develops web sites knows this. Anyone who hints in a forum the numbers may be accurate immediately gets slapped down. It's the non-technical advertisers who don't know this. And they're the only ones who care about this ranking in order to gauge how much to spend on purchasing web site advertising. Since almost no web sites publicly display traffic info advertisers find Alexa rankings very convenient and probably just don't understand why they'd be useless.

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

Alexa also doesn't calculate masked domains.

I have a blogger blog that is masked with my own domain name.

Ditt what Taco said

Yep - Alexa's sample size is pretty small, but skewed toward IE folks and people who install/game it so their web sites rank well ... although I think anything in the top-1000 is almost always "something" significant. Unfortunately, there aren't a lotta metrics out there (plus those often provide varying results), and this is easy to understand and free, so it's often used.

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 Slashdot - I can only imagine the number of hits/page-views/etc.

Let's talk about this "most" thing

> not supported for most browsers in the world

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 sort of information use it like I do -- only as a starting point to filter out the really bad products. For anything important or where I'm spending more than a few bucks, I'll read the reviews of a product as it's still the only way to really get any good information.

Another reason to dislike Alexa

Alexa also rewards webmasters who write badly broken IE only webpages, forcing people who normally use Firefox to switch over to IE for that webpage.

Useless or Used Wrong?

Now it's clear that the rankings from this system are heavily skewed and misses a substantial portion of the user base.

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.

SearchStatus for Firefox

The SearchStatus plugin for Firefox displays the Alexa rank and the Google Pagerank for a page graphically side-by-side. I use these to get a quick idea about the popularity of a site. The two numbers are a lot more useful together. For example, PageRank Zero and a high Alexa Rank implies that the site is either brand new or trying to cheat the ranks.

BZZT.

One fact TFA and the Slashdot title both got wrong, is Alexa wasn't Amazon's idea. Until Amazon bought it in 1999, Alexa was the commercial offshoot of archive.org [archive.org] for three years. Alexa is still what gives the Wayback Machine its web crawls.

Incorrect Use of Metrics

Not only is the idea flawed (unless they get a lot more users), but the metric by which they claim to rank is not properly implemented. They claim to multiply the reach and page view numbers (well, they say it's the geometric mean, but the ordering is the same), but reach clearly gets weighted higher. I've compared their numbers against their rankings and found this to be true in all cases.

SearchStatus and skewing results in your favor

For Firefox, you can use the SearchStatus extension (download from either the Firefox add-ons page [mozilla.org] or their home page [quirk.biz]). It's actually a somewhat useful tool also, in that it displays Google PageRank and Alexa rank for each site you visit, and has a few decent tools for showing various search engine related information for a given page. It also feeds data on every page you visit to Alexa as a byproduct of looking up their Alexa rank, which may be a positive or a negative for you. I personally verified that Alexa rankings change as a result of this Firefox extension, based on the fact that a couple of my personal pages (which I generally look at several times a day) were unranked prior to me installing the extension and then had a large spike in traffic not long after I installed it.

I pointed out to my boss awhile back when he was complaining about our Alexa rank that if he actually wanted the rank to improve, probably the easiest way to do it would be to have every person in the company install and use either the Alexa toolbar for IE or the SearchStatus extension for Firefox. If you're not one of the top hundred sites (or so), then Alexa ranks seem pretty easy to manipulate. Having company employees install their toolbar isn't even gaming the system per se, it's just making sure that people who are likely to be visiting the sites you care about are "well represented". As for why people put so much stock in Alexa rankings despite the obvious facts against their reliability, it's simply because there's nothing better out there. I'm sure Google could do what Alexa does much better if they felt like it, based on both search engine traffic and the Google toolbar users (has to be a LOT more of those than Alexa toolbar users). Then marketing drones would be watching those ranks obsessively instead. They take what they can get.

Playing With Fantasy

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter if it should be trusted, it is in any case. I've even seen Wikipedia use Alexa rankings as a basis for whether a website is notable enough for its own article...

But I guess statistics have always been used to allow people to fool around with fantasy and avoid facing reality.

Real?

it's a number on a website that is considered "Real" to some

That's not real, that's int.

Alexa Stats

Alexa doesn't rank itself but you can chek their stats at adbrite site http://site.www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/purchase_f orm.php?opid=19607&afsid=1&spid=15 [adbrite.com] they get just over 5000 visitors a day, I don't know how many people installed their toolbar but they must be multiplying visitor numbers and traffic stats like crazy. With such a low user base the ranking stats they have can't be very accurate. I have couple of sites and on that gets twice more visotrs, according to my server logs, is ranked way lower on Alexa the the other.

don't see the point

Alexa is flawed from the start.
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.

Alexa is indeed a bit crap

Nobody really denies that Alexa is a bit crap anymore. It's so easy to manipulate you'll wake up one morning and Joe-Bob's myspace page will appear to be the most visited site on the Internets. The problem is, that nobody has really offered a competing solution.

A solution that allows you to track visits to any given website must be something on the user end. You can't expect every website to install some piece of tracking code. It might be possible if a service like Alexa was standardized and put into all browsers from the get-go, but this brings up privacy implications and would never happen in any version of reality.

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. Rather than ranked #1-infinity, though, every page is ranked from 0 to 10. Not as specific, but about as useful a ranking as you're ever going to need.

WTF is Alexa?

Seriously, why bother writing two or three sentences anymore? Just put a single link on a single word, that's even less helpful and even less work for the editors.

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".

Sounds like a great tool

This Alexa thing sounds like a great tool for anyone wanting to know which websites are most frequented by IE users who are susceptible to Internet advertising.

Polling data in general

Whenever you conduct a poll, and that's what Alexa is doing, you are always excluding data from those who do not respond to polls (for whatever reason). It's an inherent flaw in polling.

Wikipedia editors constantly need to be smacked

Wikipedia constantly uses Alexa to see if linking to a website or profileing a website is "notable". Despite outrage by the people who submitted the content, usually everything that gets nominated for deletion has some editor cite alexa as a reason to delete it.

Alexa spyware

Why would anybody want to install their toolbar when they are known to be a spyware company?

Google loves me, Alexa doesn't

My Web site has a Google PageRank of 7, but an Alexa rank of 261,144. I can't be the only one that has a site with good GoogleJuice and a good number of visitors, but an Alexa rank that falls below Jean Teasdale-esque Geocities sites with angel and "survivor" glurge.

Alexa ratings can be worthwhile

Alexa rankings will always be worthless compared to the site traffic logs, but it does have some uses. It's a "big picture" tool at best and can be used to spot trends in traffic growth / decay. When I work on linking strategies or affiliate marketing I use Alexa data in a general way to drill down the huge pool of possible targets. It enables me to sort a long list easily.

Another thing it's good for is during campaigns. The spikes in traffic during a promotion can help give an idea of its success. Obviously not accurate, but a significator of trends. It usually reflects fairly accurately what I find in the traffic logs themselves - for instance a jump in traffic for October during the "xxx" promotion or whatever....

What's important is that all Web analytics and sampling have flaws. There is no perfect tool. Agencies use data from Statmarket, Netratings, Onestat, etc every single day to make business decisions, even when this data varies widely.

My own method is to gather what I can from tools like Alexa and compare it with others. Contrast, crunch, find something useful. Hopefully.

All the cool kids use..

All the cool kids use alexaholic [alexaholic.com]

Doesn't make the stats any more accurate but at least it makes them look pretty.

MOST flawed? Oh no.

I refer you to the "plog".

Nothing's perfect, but it's not worthless

Alexa's usefulness is more statistical than exact. I don't use it to see specifically how much traffic a site gets, but to see how it changes over time. As long as their measurement standards don't deviate too much, then this can still be useful information.

The problem: Lack of trust

When Alexa first came out, I was willing to use it. There were two features that it provided, and page ranking was actually the least important. Far more important to me was the goal of building an inverted index of the web -- tracking who linked to this site I was looking at, rather than seeing who this site links to.

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 no restriction on how they used that information. All the information about me that came to the right of the question mark was now in a commercial database, just as bad as AOL's release of search engine queries.

That gave a 100% loss of trust for me. And not just me.

People who know what's going on won't install Alexa because it's giving unrestricted access to personal information to a commercial company for their own profit. And, the "backwards index" -- which helps the internet navigation globally -- is no longer the focus of the product.

So for most people, it has lost any purpose and functionality.

This is why it is so fundamentally off on any numbers it generates. Heck, Neilson ratings have to be more accurate :-).

Still useful

Sorry but Alexa is still useful to guage trends and "generalized" site popularity.

Here's a great example: POXNORA STATS [alexa.com]

PoxNora is a game that was slashdotted last week. See the big spike in their traffic graph (roughly Oct 13/14)?? That's when they got slashdotted. Don't tell me Alexa stats are completely useless.

The only flaw is taking alexa seriously

Any webmaster worth their weight in salt knows Alexa data is flawed. This isn't news for nerds.

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.

High Alexa Rating == frequented by noobs

How is it that Anybody chooses to run the Alexa toolbar, when "tracking which web sites you visit" is such a clear synonym to "Spyware"? This reveals another skew on the ratings that Alexa can provide: Any site that gets a high Alexa rating is a site that is frequented by Inexperienced and gullible Internet Explorer for Windows users who don't mind having spyware installed on their computer. This seems to me to mean: If the site has a high Alexa rating, it is a site that I don't want to visit. Alexa is... Spy Ware!!

Google or Yahoo could create a better web ranking

The real reason for TV stats is for advertisers and TV stations to work out how much they can sell advertising for.

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.

Alexa misleading

If you have the alexa tool bar and you check your website a few times a day. Your rating will improve by 100,000's. =) My traffic hasn't changed for www.housefox.ca at all in the past year but it has gone from an alexa ranking of 200,000 to 580,000 in a period of 6 months because I stopped checking it daily own my computer with the alexa bar installed.

Check it out for yourself.

Yeah and MOST for slashdot is not IE

The problem is that statisically it's nice to say that 30% does not make a majority but Im sure that spreads changes from website to website. Imagine looking at the statistics for a Linux website. The majority there better not be IE.

Re:slashdot & alexa

Given the slashdot's geek crowd, its hard to grasp that alexa gets its numbers from Alexa toolbar installed slashdotters..

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.

Re:Interesting definition of 'most'

Their statement can be taken two ways:

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.

Re:First post.

Correction: would you really want to waste it by saying that

Re:you i8sensi7ive clod!

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Interesting definition of 'most'

Last time I checked, the term 'most' meant a majority.

Firefox, Safari and Opera may have significant market penetration, but 30% a majority does not make.

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, aka "most."

Re:Interesting definition of 'most'

Why is this moderated flamebaitj or (now) troll? Is it because of this statement? "I remember when slashdot used to post news. You know, 'news for nerds. stuff that matters'? Lately, the tagline might as well change to Slashdot: "Some idiot posted this somewhere on the web. We'll ride their coat tails."

As another early member of the slashdot community, I couldn't agree more with that statement. That is not flamebait. That is a fact. Hands up, how many four and five digit members agree with daVinci and ionizer?