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.

Comments

File Upload Sites & their ranking

[in2mind]

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...

The data shows there are problems

[technoextreme]

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

Re:The data shows there are problems

[jamie]

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

[badasscat]

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.

The people that matter

[truthsearch]

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.

BZZT.

[Rob T Firefly]

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 for three years. Alexa is still what gives the Wayback Machine its web crawls.

Re:But is supported for the #1 browser

[daeg]

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.

Wikipedia editors constantly need to be smacked

[Anonymous Coward]

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.