you have many options to search web but how many options do you have to find out how popular a site is? You might have often wondered how to find out how popular a site really is? to get some idea of how many are coming into a site.
Answer to your search comes from the Alexa service (An Amazon.com company). They are in existence for several years now. Over these years, they were in the business of ranking sites. This is probably the Internets only site ranking service that’s hugely popular. We are trying to introduce it to as many more people as possible.
How does Alexa do it?
What alexa essentially has is a tool bar. This is a small tool bar that installs itself on the top of your browser (Internet explorer, netscape etc…) like your google or yahoo tool bar. Millions of users across the world use alexa tool bar on their browsers. As these visitors browse internet and go from page to page and site to site, alexa gathers data on which site is tool bar user going. This way they find out how many people are going to a particular site.
What’s your benefit?
What tool bars user gets, is a result of this previously described work of Alexa. Through the information they keep gathering by means of tool bars of millions of users, the are able to, on a real time basis report the rank of a particular site back to you through your own tool bar. This happens as we said before, in real time, automatically, and dynamically. That’s when it gets interesting.
When you are introduced to a new business or portal or other type of site, you have no idea of whether the company or the site you are dealing with can be trusted or whether it is actually popular. However you can quickly get an idea of how popular the site is, and through that the trustworthiness of the site, using alexa’s rank report.
Using the tool bar, you can also quickly gather information on who the site is owned by, which are the other sites the visitors to a particular site is visiting etc..
This service is a free service for anyone who wish to use it.
Rank 1 is owned by Yahoo, 2 by MSN and 3 by Google at the time of this writing.
What’s more;
Alexa has the above yet unmatched features and many more.. For sites which come under a rank of less than 100,000 they offer much more than simple rank. You can view daily page visit statistics and site visit statistics if you wish to learn more about the site.
- They have a nice popup blocker bundled with the tool bar.
- For web masters they have traffic stats button for their sites.
- They sell real time traffic information for those who are serious about their service.
- They are an amazon.com company and hence trusted.
- They may be reported as a spyware by some anti-spyware software. However they do no spying except reporting to the service for the sake of gathering traffic data of the users.
- Install their tool bar from the link on the right.
Installation is quick and trouble free. As soon as the tool bar
is setup you would start gathering the ranks of sites.
- A look of the Alexa tool bar on your PC.
Next : Copernic – Search in many search engines from within one program.
Quotable Quotes:
“It is your attitude, not your aptitude that determines your altitude.”