Alexa receives an upgrade
Alexa.com, currently the leader in worldwide website statistics, has finally given their website a little update. Well, they updated it a tiny bit, a very small tiny bit. The homepage still looks the same, a bit boring and similiar to the search pages of Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves, but when you look further you’ll see quite some interesting things.
The frontpage has hardly changed, it shows some ‘movers’ & ’shakers’ in rankings, the top 10 of most visited websites and last but not least, a set of new links. Those links point at various other pages with statistics, such as the Top 500, Top x by language or website category, finally showing you some more detailed ranking information than the old and boring overview.
But that’s not all, the website information pages have changed some as well, websites ranked in the top 100 000 will now get somewhat more detailed information on things such as national rankings, visitor locations and percentages of people visiting it on a daily basis. Sadly Leftblank is a little out of the top 100 000; I’m currently ranked in the high 198 000’s, Otfans – my other website – does show some nice numbers. I was surprised to see it’s ranking in the top 2000 in both the Netherlands and Sweden at the moment, not a bad thing for such a specific forum if you ask me.
Even though Alexa is currently the leader in this kind of statistics, they are quite controversial with their service. First of all, the data is collected using spyware that comes with Windows XP; the Alexa ‘toolbar’, by default it’s not really a toolbar but just an application that sends back data of each site you visit, they do allow you to download their toolbar though in order to get some more detailed information. So well, only visitors using the Alexa toolbar are counted, which are users on Windows XP or 2000 using Internet Explorer, this might sound like the majority of the internet users right now, which is indeed pretty near the truth, but to tell you from my own site reports, it’s not even 50% of the traffic on my website due to the popularity of Firefox and other open browsers. So be careful with what you believe of Alexa; it’s nice, but not exact or reliable.
Oops, a little update, I thought only websites currently ranked in the top 100 000 received more detailed information, but it turns out Leftblank also has them available. I’m even more shocked by these results though, I’m currently ranked 1 445th in the Dutch rankings!
Popularity: 5% [?]