Alexa Internet Inc. is based in California. It is a subsidiary company of Amazon.com. This company is reputed for operation of a website that offers information regarding web traffic to the other websites.

History and operations upto 1999

Alexa Internet was established by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle in 1996. This company provided a toolbar. This was used to guide the users of the Internet regarding where to go next. This guidance had its basis the traffic patterns of the community of its users. Every site visited was offered a context by Alexa.

It provided information regarding who had registered the site, the number of pages the site had, the number of sites that pointed to it and the frequency of updation of the site. The Alexa engineers collaborated with the Internet Archive to create the Wayback machine of the Internet Archive. Also, the supplier of Internet Archive with web crawls is Alexa. In 1999, Amazon.com acquired Alexa. This was done due to the $250 million in the stock of Amazon. The premises of this company are the Presidio of San Francisco, Building 37.

History and operations after 1999

A partnership was started by Alexa along with Google in 2002 spring. In January 2003, Alexa started a partnership with the Open Directory Project. In May 2006, Google was replaced by Live Search to provide the search results. From September 2006, the company started to use their self Search Platform to offer the results. In December 2006, the Alexa Image Search was released by the company. This was completely built in-house.

This became the first major application that was built on the company’s web platform. The A9.com search engine is also offered “site info” by Alexa. In December 2005, the extensive search index and web crawling facilities were opened by Alexa to third party programs. This was accomplished by means of a complete set of APIs and web services. Vertical search engines could be constructed by the use of these facilities. These engines could run on the servers of Alexa or elsewhere also.

The Web Search Platform was unique in offering access to their raw crawl data for the developers. In May 2007, the API was altered by Alexa. Now, it needed comparisons to be limited to three sites. The size of embedded graphs to be shown using Flash was decreased. In April 2007, Hornbaker versus Alexa case was filed. This was done to put an end to the trademark infringement done by the statsaholic service. Alexa alleged that its traffic graphs were being stolen by Hornbaker for profit.

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