Personally I like the Dogpile.com toolbar. The RSS ticker makes it OH so easy to keep track of all my daMn feeds and the built in Dictionary/Thesaurus has saved my button on more then one homework assignment! I actually JUST deinstalled Alexa last night (no joke) because ad-aware tag'd a bunch of it's files/reg keys as something nasty so....asta' la' bye bye.
I used it to help get Alexa/archive.org discover my new site. Then it was uninstall time... more screen clutter.
The same as wny. the people say it's good for getting your site crawled - not only for Alexa, but for Google, too. And for getting a rank. But on Firefox - no chance :-( Other thing: I would't use, if it wouldn't help my site : Don't think it's a good toolbar!
i regularly use alexa i also love the new siteinfo.xml alexa offers as much as i have a look at the "related links" and "sites linking in" above all i love the thumbnails alexa supplies to G and Y i have them activated in my G results and the thumbnail gives an instant glance at how a site looks = friendly or dark, and I use the thumbnails for my "pre-filtering" of results to click oir skip. in addition the regular "info.txt" file displayed on the alexa page for a site gives an idea about who the site owner is = anonymous or a real person after all those many benefits, i am loyal to alexa by using the alexa toolbar as well for most those data created by USING an alexa toolbar might be for the benefit of all other sites visited, hence a site owner benefits mainly from OTHERS having alexa toolbar installed. you never can expect others to do more for you than you for others ... latest by the time you plan to sell a domain the alexa data might be a factor for adjusting a price up or down by factor 10+
I still use it to rank up some of my sites. People still look at it so might as well use people's ignorance to my advantage.
From another site: Why use the alexa toolbar? "It’s simple. The Alexa “spyware†toolbar monitors all my surfing and collects information about what domains I visit. They don’t know that it’s “me†– they collect it as anonymous user data and use it to rank web sites. Not only does Alexa use this information for determining where people surf on the web but so does google. Let me repeat that fact so it sinks in: Google Uses Alexa’s Information For Ranking and Indexing! Installing the Alexa toolbar and surfing your own site will absolutely help you get your sites indexed by Google more quickly. I just started this blog today, and the googlebot has already come by without any inbound links! Because the Alexa toolbar is such a pile, no one ever keeps it installed. So just by updating and surfing your own site daily, (assuming NO ONE else does), you can get your Alexa ranking from 5,500,000 or “no data†to around 300,000 in under a month and to 100,000 in 3 months." True or Untrue?
The Alexa toolbar is used mainly by those interested in website traffic so this would be seo's, sem's. web developers, web designers, directory owners, etc. Tha average person could care little about Alexa toolbar... This being the case, the tool is not a true measure of traffic to a website.