[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)