Alexa thumbnails, traffic ranking and other alexa stuff

Information on Alexa and its services

Alexa web information service

Alexa has a huge storehouse of data regarding the structure of the web and the traffic. This is made available to the developers through Alexa Web Information Service. Data is collected regarding the web sites like related links, contact information and traffic data. The historical traffic data regarding the websites can be accessed. Due to this growth of the web site traffic can be analyzed. Also, the effects of particular events on the traffic of the web site can be understood. A web directory can be built into the service or web site. For this, the DMOZ based browser service that has been enhanced by Alexa can be used.

Alexa top sites

There is a list of web sites that have been arranged as per the Alexa Traffic rank. The Alexa top sites service offers access to this list. Due to this web service, the traffic rankings from the smallest to the largest sites can be understood by the developers. By default, the users can view 100 web sites at a time in this list. Multiple requests are essential to view lists of other sizes like the top one thousand, five thousand or one lakh. For every site, the page views, reach and traffic rank data can be retrieved. The data can be obtained for individual nations or for the whole world.

Alexa thumbnails

There are thumbnail images of the home pages of web sites. Developers are offered programmatic access to these images through the Alexa Thumbnail service. Due to the continuous web crawl, Alexa has collected a huge number of images. Using Alexa thumbnail images, the developers can search blog entries, web directories, results and improve the web sites. This service is very easy to use. The thumbnail images are in small as well as large sizes. If a thumbnail that is requested does not exist, it is generated automatically in 24 hours.

Alexa Web Search

Alexa’s web search engine can be programmatically accessed by Alexa Web Search service. The search results can be incorporated directly in the web services or sites by the developers. If traditional search engines cannot answer some complex queries, these can be answered by this service. Traditional search engines do not permit the users to retrieve huge quantities of data in a programmed manner. The results offered by Alexa web search are very comprehensive. For every query, there are up to ten million results. There is a potent query syntax, that allows the use of Boolean operators, grouping, phrases and wildcards.

Alexa traffic rankings

Alexa analyzes the use of the web of a very large number of users of the Alexa Toolbar and thereby calculates the traffic rankings. The information that is available is arranged, separated, anonymized, measured and calculated to eventually get the traffic rankings. This is a slightly complicated procedure.

Traffic rank

The traffic data from thousands of users of Alexa toolbar is collected for three months. The traffic rank is based on this data. It is a combined measure of users (reach) and page views. The first step is that in case of all sites on the Web, the reach and the number of page views is calculated on a daily basis. The average of these two quantities over time is found out. The geometric mean of the reach and page views is used to determine the traffic rank. As a result, the traffic rank is indicative of not only the number of users that visit the site but also the number of pages on the site that has been seen by the users. The current rank of the site is compared with the rank three months back to find out the three month change. For instance, the difference between the rank in the first quarter of the year and the second quarter, would be displayed as a three month change on 1st of July.

Web hosts

The sites for which traffic is calculated are generally defined at a domain level. For instance, the web hosts www.abc.com, def.abc.com and ghi.abc.com are considered to be a part of the same site. The reason is that all of these have the same domain, abc.com. Personal home pages or blogs are an exception. In case they can be automatically recognized from the URL, they are treated separately. Those sites which serve similar content are also counted as the same site.

Reach

The number of users is counted in the Reach. This is generally denoted by a percentage. For instance, if a site abc.com has a reach of 21 percent, it means that out of the global Internet users which have been counted by Alexa, 21 percent users visit abc.com.

Page views

The number of pages that has been seen by the users of Alexa toolbar is counted in the Page views. If a user during one day sees one page several times, it is counted only one time. The average of the numbers of unique pages seen by one user per day is calculated as the page view per user.

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