Alexa, Amazon's Most Flawed Idea 113
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 (Score:1, Informative)
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 (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.
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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.
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No, but you want stats that are at least indicative. A slight userbase difference taste (such as, being against installing random toolbars that gather personal data) suddenly makes a huge difference. While you can tell that Bob's Fishery website isn't getting as much traffic as Amazon, any comparison of competitors within 10x of each other is troublesome, at best.
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By using a dial up account you can boost your ratings with just 10 minutes a day surfing.
With Alexa's Toolbar installed on IE and a good old free NetZero account 5 minutes in the morning before work browsing 22 or more pages and 5 minutes in the evening doing the same 22 pages will send your new site in the 100K rating area. Add 2 people doing that and you grow.
This is not at all what you can conside
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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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http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=1y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=msn.c om#top [alexa.com]
or amazon.com
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=1y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=amazo n.com#top [alexa.com] these places I guess are mostly Firefox-neutral.
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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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But is supported for the #1 browser (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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What a great line! I'm going to steal it for next week's meetings.
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Some companies do this, eg. Hitwise.
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.
Yeah and MOST for slashdot is not IE (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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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
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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 i
masked domains (Score:2)
I have a blogger blog that is masked with my own domain name.
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Unless the toolbar goes off of what you type into the address bar rater than the urls that are actually loaded, would I would consider more likely. Do they say how they do it?
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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
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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
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It's correct. A minority need not be small, just less than half. Depending on how you count them, these are just 2 browsers out of many. They are certainly less than half of the browsers I use over the course of a year. (Opera, FF, Seamonkey, IE, Links, Lynx, Amaya, [is wget a browser?], offbyone, I really should use Konqueror more, ...)
I think you may be thinking of the popularity of these browsers - the
Another reason to dislike Alexa (Score:2, Insightful)
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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
SearchStatus for Firefox (Score:1)
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BZZT. (Score:5, Insightful)
Incorrect Use of Metrics (Score:1)
SearchStatus and skewing results in your favor (Score:2)
Playing With Fantasy (Score:1)
But I guess statistics have always been used to allow people to fool around with fantasy and avoid facing reality.
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Real? (Score:3, Funny)
That's not real, that's int.
Alexa Stats (Score:1)
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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.
Alexa is indeed a bit crap (Score:1)
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
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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
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".
Sounds like a great tool (Score:1)
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.
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Polling data in general (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia editors constantly need to be smacked (Score:4, Interesting)
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Its not a world repositiry of knowledge.
Its consensus report on what majority defines as knowledge.Nothing else.
Those large technical articles which contain lots of accurate data are result of dedicated editing efforts,which can be striken off if it gets into dispute.
And most wikipedians only think of this as quirks or grouphink,becuase
Alexa spyware (Score:1)
Google loves me, Alexa doesn't (Score:1)
Alexa ratings can be worthwhile (Score:1)
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. Obviou
All the cool kids use.. (Score:1)
Doesn't make the stats any more accurate but at least it makes them look pretty.
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
Still useful (Score:1, Interesting)
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 (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.
High Alexa Rating == frequented by noobs (Score:1)
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.
Alexa misleading (Score:1)
Check it out for yourself.
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