[HN Gopher] We will be retiring Alexa.com ___________________________________________________________________ We will be retiring Alexa.com Author : dlackty Score : 329 points Date : 2021-12-08 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (support.alexa.com) (TXT) w3m dump (support.alexa.com) | sbt567 wrote: | Oh man, really? After I just created a script to fetch similar | sites using it? | orliesaurus wrote: | A huge piece of the internet is going away: back in the early | 2000s I would use Alexa a lot it was a gold mine of information - | to the point where some people bragged about their rank on Alexa | - that was hilarious, like the modern "twitter followers" / | "github stars" | julienreszka wrote: | This kind of news makes me depressed I don't know why this | affects me so much. Getting old maybe | spike021 wrote: | As a reminder, OpenDNS (now Cisco Umbrella) provides a similar | top websites listing: http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/umbrella- | static/index.html | glonq wrote: | TIL that Alexa is/was still alive. I don't think I've used that | site for at least a dozen years. RIP | tablespoon wrote: | IIRC, their crawler pushes (or pushed) a lot of page into the | Internet Archive Wayback Machine. What kind of effect will this | shutdown have on it? | Trung0246 wrote: | Is there an anternative to the ranking? I don't know if sucs | thing exist since everywhere I saw people keep mentioning alexa | ranking... | dutchbrit wrote: | Majestic is the first one that comes to mind. | spike021 wrote: | Commented above, but OpenDNS (Cisco Umbrella) has a similar top | listing: http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/umbrella- | static/index.html | speedgoose wrote: | 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 must provide great data. It's not publicly | available though. | | https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/privacy/public-dns... | (CloudFlare stores aggregated data) | | https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy (well, | it's Google) | jlelse wrote: | Cloudflare has Radar: https://radar.cloudflare.com/ | speedgoose wrote: | My bad, it's pretty good. (except the map, which is very | much this https://xkcd.com/1138/ ) | rightbyte wrote: | Interesting how Tiktok is so high (#1). | kzrdude wrote: | I don't understand how apple.com can rank over youtube.com? | In what way is apple a daily service that people must | access? I guess some apple service that I don't use like | music? | quesera wrote: | Just a guess, but Apple devices hit Apple services fairly | regularly, each requiring a DNS lookup. | | 1.1.1.1 is Cloudflare's public DNS service. | aembleton wrote: | Isn't it the default homepage on Safari? A few years | since I've used a Macbook, but I thought it was. | mardifoufs wrote: | Probably apple telemetry. At least some of the phoning | home is done using apple.com as a domain so it can add up | very quickly. If anything I'm surprised the top domains | aren't just telemetry endpoints, but I guess telemetry is | a good use case for bare IPs so it doesn't show up as | much on DNS analytics. | mritzmann wrote: | According to NextDNS my MacBooks talks constantly with | some apple.com subdomains. Some are blocked by NextDNS | for privacy reasons. | skuhn wrote: | Cloudflare only has access to DNS requests made to their | resolvers, not the amount of bandwidth utilized (which | would certainly push Netflix and YouTube up) or the | number of requests made. They also have some vaguely | defined fudge factors to their rankings. | | To take a guess at why Apple is so high, I think bundling | all of these together might help their rank: | | - App store downloads | | - iOS updates | | - Apple TV+ streaming | | - Services that iOS / tvOS / macOS devices utilize | | - Apple Music / iTunes downloads | | - iCloud (including Private Relay and related traffic) | sltkr wrote: | Sounds like those would provide rather biased samples because | changing your DNS server from whatever you get from your ISP | via DHCP is something that approximately no normal person | would ever do. | r721 wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Similarweb | TedShiller wrote: | There is really no good reason to retire Alexa | jaimie wrote: | Interestingly, Alexa was founded by Brewster Kahle, who founded | the Internet Archive contemporaneously (both in 1996). | Interesting flow of ideas between the two projects - one to | figure out what is getting traffic (commercial) and one to figure | out how to preserve it (non-profit). | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle | kragen wrote: | It's not just a flow of ideas; it's also a flow of web-page | snapshots. IIRC, "Alexa" was named after the Library of | Alexandria. | elektor wrote: | I imagine today is a great day to be working at SimilarWeb. When | I did SEO related research, these two were my go to for | determining how popular a website was. | tomwojcik wrote: | If you wish, you can download some of the top 1m records from | their s3 | | curl http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip --output | ~/Downloads/alexa.zip | | Today it contains the top 630779 records. | slater wrote: | anyone remember alexadex, a website stockmarket (using fake | money) that took alexa's site rankings as the website's price? so | many hours spent... | 3guk wrote: | Damn that brings back some good memories of the internet of old | ! | boborhythm wrote: | Tranco[0] was already mentioned by another comment, but I | recommend reading their paper[1] to see how these lists are | created, and how they can be manipulated (paper covers Alexa, | Cisco Umbrella, Majestic Million, and Quantcast). | | From the introduction summary: "e.g. only one HTTP request | suffices to enter the widely used Alexa top million. We | empirically validate that reaching a rank as good as 28 798 is | easily achieved." | | [0]: https://tranco-list.eu/ | | [1]: https://tranco-list.eu/assets/tranco-ndss19.pdf | driverbooster wrote: | https://teknobird.com/canva-pro-ucretsiz-1-aylik-ve-sinirsiz... | https://teknobird.com/driver-booster-pro-ucretsiz-lisans/ | ArtTimeInvestor wrote: | Wow, that is a bummer! | | Alexa is my go-to place to get a first impression on how much | traffic a website gets. | | I have never looked into how they get their data, I always | assumed they get it from internet providers? | | Is there an alternative? SimilarWeb publishes their data with a | huge delay, so it is not of much use for me. From my experience, | it is also less reliable. | | It is crazy how valuable internet properties get closed down when | they are owned by giant companies. According to Alexa, Alexa is | still a top-5000 site: | | https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/alexa.com | | It seems insane to just close it down. | Kye wrote: | Alexa used to get it from a browser toolbar. This limited the | data to people who install toolbars that are strictly used by | marketers. | diebeforei485 wrote: | > Alexa is my go-to place [...] I have never looked into how | they get their data | | Right, this is a problem with all sorts of data sources that | provide numbers (and use lots of SEO) but don't talk much about | their methodology. CelebrityNetWorth is another example of | this. | tomlin wrote: | How fondly people remember a company that totally installed | tracking software into browser add-ons. | freediver wrote: | Tranco list [1] is considered the most accurate source for | relative site ranking by traffic. It is a result of | triangulation of data from several sources (one of them is | Alexa) and it what we use at Kagi Search for domain information | [2] | | [1] https://tranco-list.eu/ | | [2] https://kagi.com | smt88 wrote: | > _Alexa is my go-to place to get a first impression on how | much traffic a website gets._ | | Alexa hasn't been a reliable source of traffic data for many | years. It's gotten worse as mobile devices, private browsers, | VPNs, and tight-fisted companies (like Facebook) have become | more widespread. | | If you own a high-traffic site and check Alexa, it's not even | close. One of my sites wasn't in the order of magnitude. | cutenewt wrote: | What's the best alternative for website traffic estimates? | cyral wrote: | I thought they had a browser toolbar/extension which they use | to collect data from a very very small subset of internet | users, which is probably incredibly biased to a certain | audience. (e.g. boomers who don't know how to not install | random toolbars when downloading stuff). | tonymet wrote: | they had a browser toolbar to collect user agent signals | smarx007 wrote: | How does Alexa work? It seems to me it's hard for anyone except | Google Analytics or Cloudflare to build such a service. | input_sh wrote: | They used to have its own toolbar that tracked which websites | users visit. | | After that, they've paid other browser add-ons to add their | script and some websites voluntarily gave them their data by | adding their tracker. | | It says so right on the about page (warning: unusable on | mobile): https://www.alexa.com/about | ralusek wrote: | You'd assume that this would give a super biased sample of | the population that would skew boomer+. | duskwuff wrote: | It was always biased, and it's only gotten worse over | time as browser toolbars have ceased to be a thing and | data collection in browser extensions has been heavily | discouraged. I have to wonder if that's one of the | reasons they're phasing the product out. | madaxe_again wrote: | Yeah, it was also really handy for figuring out how to | attack various web properties, as they frequently indexed | administrative pages that were secured through nothing but | obscurity, as the toolbar was most popular with amateur | (and (im)professional) webmasters. | | Ah, the good old days. | Uehreka wrote: | Google Analytics would only work on sites that run Google | Analytics, which would exclude sites run by the other big | tech companies. Alexa worked because their toolbar addon | would record every site their users went to, regardless of | what was running on the site. | skarz wrote: | I remember vaguely that they got their metrics from a browser | toolbar. | lelandfe wrote: | Handwavey "proprietary methodology" using data from "millions | of Internet users using one of many different browser | extensions" and "direct sources in the form of sites that | have chosen to install the Alexa script."[0] | | Translation: trust us | | [0] https://www.alexa.com/about | lgats wrote: | Initially, it was mostly by monitoring the traffic of users | of the alexa toolbar, https://www.alexa.com/toolbar | | I think they moved on to more broad data sources, possibly | purchasing data from ISPs. | fragmede wrote: | Read between the lines as to how this similar product from | Cisco works. | | http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/umbrella- | static/index.html | lgats wrote: | I've loaded in Alexa, Majestic, Cisco DNS, and Tranco rankings | into this site: | | https://domain.glass/ycombinator.com#dns_rank | | Not the prettiest, but I use it a fair amount myself for | researching domains. | bentcorner wrote: | apple.com being so high is (to me) a little counter- | intuitive. microsoft.com too for the same reason. They don't | seem like the sites people would be using a lot in their day- | to-day lives. I guess it's counting dns lookups from devices | and not necessarily "human" web page/app requests? | CSSer wrote: | It's been forever since I've seen this first hand, but iirc | apple.com and microsoft.com are both default homepages in | Safari on macOS and Edge on Windows, respectively. That may | artificially inflate the numbers a bit too. | fragmede wrote: | TIL about https://bookface.ycombinator.com/ | jeofken wrote: | I'm perplexed about " whoredom.groups.ycombinator.com" ? | From grandparents link | TigeriusKirk wrote: | Is "groups" the private messageboard for yc participants? | pja wrote: | groups.ycombinator.com redirects to Google groups. | kingcharles wrote: | Damn, with that data TikTok.com is ranked #1 O_O | JohnJamesRambo wrote: | The world suddenly makes sense doesn't it? | 0xcoffee wrote: | Also interesting doubleverify.com is ranked 14th, the first | I did not hear of. | | Quickly looked them up, some sort of anti-fraud company, | working with TikTok apparently. There website doesn't load | for me, I'm wondering if they are target of DDOS attack | which might actually move them up the rankings haha | togilvie wrote: | It's an ad tracker. It's loading in ads that people see, | but isn't the source website generating the traffic. | cosmojg wrote: | Ah, that makes sense. I take it that its name is a play | on "DoubleClick"? | lxchase wrote: | DoubleVerify is an adfraud and brand safety tracker. | Basically, they ensure that your ads are displayed to | people and not on questionable content if you dont want | to. Most agencies and large direct advertisers add this | 3rd party to ensure actual humans are seeing the ads, and | thus the advertiser is paying for "good" eyeballs instead | of "bad". It's essentially a 3rd party checking that the | ad network doesn't do anything naughty, which some sites | have done in the past. | eatonphil wrote: | Neat! How often do you update this? | shadowoflight wrote: | Damn, that headline had me very excited right up until the ".com" | at the end. | yesimahuman wrote: | That Amazon kept a site named Alexa with absolutely nothing to do | with _that_ Alexa alive for _this_ long is quite impressive. | stavros wrote: | Oh jeez, it wasn't until your comment that I remembered the | original Alexa. It used to be so big, too! | itslennysfault wrote: | This is literally a post about the original Alexa closing | down. | stavros wrote: | Yes, and I saw that comment first and remembered there was | another Alexa. | xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: | It seems reusing old product names is their thing: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch_(software) | blondie9x wrote: | Wow this is something where Amazon wants to kill a service for no | apparent reason. Maybe to use the domain for their Alexa AI | instead? Otherwise to restrict information on the internet. | cobrabyte wrote: | It's sort of wild to think that Amazon purchased Alexa.com in | 1999 for ~$250M in stock, and that stock would be worth more than | $7B today, if my math is correct. | | Bought a website ranking company, used the company's name as the | name of a consumer electronics assistant, and then shuttered the | company 22 years later to (presumably) be able to use the domain | name for more consumer electronics. | fault1 wrote: | In essense, what the original Alexa did seems to have been | internalized into Amazon ads (or their b2b analytics division), | which is coincidently the fastest growing part of Amazon. | | Wonder why they used the Alexa name for their home assistant. | thedailymail wrote: | This just struck me, and I don't know if it's true, but a-lex | could be a play on Greek and Latin for "not" and "written." | Which is a pretty good name for a voice-based input system. | oblio wrote: | Short, international, neutral name, somewhat easy to | pronounce in many languages. | fossuser wrote: | It's also phonetically recognizable and distinct. | | It's one of the reasons you have to say "Hey Google" or | "Hey Siri", but you're able to just say "Alexa" | | I find Siri the worst one for that, it often triggers on | "serious". | lastofthemojito wrote: | The nice thing about "OK Google" was that it sounded a | lot like "Cocaine Poodle", so you could imagine your | personal assistant was a hyperactive creature of limited | intelligence. Which honestly, sets expectations | appropriately. | romwell wrote: | My favorite command is: "Obey, Booble! Bind my bone!" | | Which is close enough to make Google find my phone :D | dougmwne wrote: | I would like to briefly visit your reality. | chadlavi wrote: | not sure if it's still the case, but in a similar vein | you used to be able to say "hey booboo" to google devices | ISL wrote: | "Hay Poodle" seems, if not quite as good, to be in the | same spirit. | gumby wrote: | My watch's Siri seems to trigger when washing my hands, | or sometimes when I am in the kitchen and somebody _else_ | opens the tap. | | I was on a zoom call the other day, both of us using | speaker (no headsets) and something trigger both our | watches to say, "sorry, I didn't get that", in each of | our languages. At least we both laughed. | jen729w wrote: | Mine too, but I think you're probably holding down the | crown in the physical action of the washing. Your hands | are bent in unusual ways and the back of your hand pushes | up against the crown. | | I don't think it's responding to a vocal 'Hey, Siri!' in | this case. | mwcampbell wrote: | Except that when my business partner and I are talking to | each other about Alexa, we have to refer to it | indirectly, e.g. "the A-lady", to avoid triggering his | Alexa devices (I don't normally have one active). | amysox wrote: | As mentioned above, to my roommate and me, it's "the A | bitch." :D | amysox wrote: | Yes, this is why we can't talk about Alexa at home. My | roommate and I, if we're not talking to it, refer to it | as "the A bitch." :D | newsbinator wrote: | My "Hey Siri" triggers on the first attempt 25% of the | time (neutral North American accent). | | I wonder if it's a slow wake-from-sleep issue or | something. | sanedigital wrote: | If our Google Home triggers accidentally its usually easy | to think back on what we said and find the offending | phrase. Siri, on the other hand, seems to trigger several | times a day without any explanation. | mattkrause wrote: | I wonder if the problem is the /s/ sound at the beginning | of Siri. | | Since it's a fricative, it sounds like the hissing noise | produced by other kinds of turbulent flow. | userbinator wrote: | "Let's, uhh..." is a pretty common sentence starter in | conversation and has been observed to trigger Alexa | before. | Retric wrote: | It's also been a popular name for decades, | http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Alexa-name-popularity.html. | | IMO, picking one of the most common US names for a voice | assistant and then skipping the wake up phrase is dumb. | judge2020 wrote: | > one of the most common US names | | With ~125k total names since the 1940's, it's not really | close to one of the most common in the US; just one that | was in the top 100 for 2 decades. | ghaff wrote: | I'd say top 100 for about the last 25 years makes it | pretty common. What surprises me a bit is that it didn't | fall off a cliff after Amazon's Alexa came out. | rightbyte wrote: | "Alexa" seems to have fallen of a cliff since Amazon's | device, though. If this site is accurate: | https://nameberry.com/babyname/Alexa | | "Alexandra" seems way more common than "Alexa". | afavour wrote: | Yeah I have a friend called Alexa and it absolutely | infuriates her. Can't say I blame her. | VRay wrote: | At least you can change the wake word on Amazon devices | | All Apple devices interpret "Hey Sarah" as "Hey Siri" and | then start shooting their stupid mouths off, bugs the | hell out of Sarah | enos_feedler wrote: | I have 2 home pod mini's, a homepod, an iphone and ipad | and i just said "hey sarah" 5 times in different ways and | I got no response. | cmeacham98 wrote: | I know it's not perfect, but if you use Amazon's Alexa | and know an Alexa you can change the wake phrase to a few | others (iirc "echo" and "amazon" are among the choices). | Retric wrote: | It's not just a question of being a friend or family | members name name. It's also easy for a YouTube video etc | to accidentally include say "Alexia turn off the lights" | as part of seemingly innocent dialog that nobody building | it thinks is going to cause a problem. | Kaibeezy wrote: | Our wake word is "amazon", lest we forget a major | corporation is listening in to our conversations about | who left the fridge open and whether we need to wear a | raincoat today. | [deleted] | trevcanhuman wrote: | Oh, now I'm confused. I thought this was about the Alexa | assistant product. Seems from other comments that this | company provides web analysis. | Brendinooo wrote: | >Early on, the team realized they needed a "wake word" that | would make the device start listening. The word would need to | have three syllables, a "distinct combination of phonemes" so | as not to unnecessarily rouse the device, and an easily | marketable name, like Apple's Siri. | | https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/here-are-the-other- | name... | barbazoo wrote: | Did they just have extreme foresight about wanting the domain | alexa.com or were they genuinely interested in alexa.com as a | product? They kept it around for 22 years after all but I can't | see how what alexa.com used to do has anything to do with what | amazon is doing. | mmaunder wrote: | Toolbar lost traction post IE6 which is where their accurate | website traffic reports came from. That was a long time ago and | it's been a joke since then. Took way too long to retire this. | gandalfian wrote: | It used to be people with the Alexa tool bar were measured to | produce a ranking. I wonder how they have been doing it more | recently and how accurate it actually was now? | bredren wrote: | Ya, I think it was originally interesting because it claimed to | show google pagerank. There was a tiny measurement bar. | mmmBacon wrote: | I had some friends who worked at Alexa. I recall they had these | bare metal servers down in the basement in these old barracks | buildings in the Presidio. I recall being impressed that the | whole thing ran on a 1GbE connection. Also was my first | introduction to companies that had lots of perks like free food, | sitting on Yoga Balls, etc.... I remember they had this raging | argument about milk as a condiment versus milk as a beverage. | Seemed like a dream to me at the time. | ravenstine wrote: | Are there any alternatives? I enjoy watching the long-term | decline of the websites of former employers I don't like. | pram wrote: | Upvoted for hilarious bitterness. | missedthecue wrote: | i've used similarweb.com | kaixi wrote: | SimilarWeb | eps wrote: | https://sitegur.com | agustif wrote: | Damn nothing lasts for ever I guess | skurtcastle wrote: | That's a real bummer. I use the alexa rankings all the time. I | get the reasons, especially w/ the name specifically. | urtaza wrote: | They get data from Alexa Toolbar to get estimated metrics and for | certificated insights you have to pay for the service and install | a script or plugin in case you have WordPress. This is so | unfortunate and sad... This is such a good tool, what will you | guys be using instead of alexa.com, similar web? semrush? moz? | none of them are as good as our beloved alexa internet. | paxys wrote: | I had no idea this Alexa was still around, and owned by Amazon. | Alexa site rankings used to be all the rage like 15 years ago. | driverdan wrote: | Did they announce this today? Seems pretty shitty to disable APIs | the same day as the announcement. | mahmutc wrote: | Not today next year, am i wrong? | crazypython wrote: | You can also use Alexa to find related sites, which is useful for | internet research. | https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com | peanut_worm wrote: | Huh I had no idea Amazon owned this Alexa. Must have been | confusing having two entirely separate services called Alexa. | marcod wrote: | I worked for amzn for over a decade until 5 years ago... nobody | ever talked about Alexa.com (I'm sure there was a department | who did, but overall, it just never came up). | [deleted] | dredmorbius wrote: | Site is NXDOMAIN. | | The page itself is not in the Wayback Machine. | | Alternate link? | renewiltord wrote: | Your resolver broken. | | opcode QUERY rcode NOERROR flags QR RD RA ;QUESTION alexa.com. | IN A ;ANSWER alexa.com. 59 IN A 13.249.109.63 alexa.com. 59 IN | A 13.249.109.113 alexa.com. 59 IN A 13.249.109.43 | dredmorbius wrote: | Ah. Probably my router's adblock. | | I can resolve the host directly querying 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 | resolvers. | | Not broken so much as working as configured ;-) | renewiltord wrote: | Cool, makes sense. Here's a tool you can use to verify that | it's not your system that's stopping the request | https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/ | dredmorbius wrote: | I actually verified by running dig locally, but thanks. | floatingatoll wrote: | Disable your DNS adblocker? | rodmena wrote: | It was a bad idea 25 years ago, and still its a bad idea. I will | never forget the day our company fired two brilliant marketing | guys just because the Alexa ranking of the site dropped 100 | points. | blocked_again wrote: | The issue is not that Alexa is a bad idea. The issue is your | company has bad ideas. | diebeforei485 wrote: | Amazon definitely has better uses for the Alexa.com domain name! | taraskuzyk wrote: | damn, my company just started using it in May, such a shame. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-08 23:00 UTC)