http://www.alexa.com/ Todays top 500 rankings place Yahoo first, MSN second, and Google 3rd. Can that possibly be correct at all based on the Alexa Toolbar users information it gathers?
Yes - Alexa is not an exact science first and foremost. Secondly, Yahoo and MSN have community groups and other features. The Alexa rankings are based on visitors, though only from Alexa users, and not searches performed. So, this doesn't mean that more searches are being performed on the other two, just that more Alexa users are going to Y! and MSN.
I just assumed that Google would be 10 fold the amount in any search, on any web toolbar than that of MSN and Yahoo. People who have an Alexa toolbar are still going to thinking first and foremost, to "google it" [through brand marketing] over that of MSN and Yahoo. Even with community groups, I still would have thought Google would still outrank Yahoo and MSN based on the fact of how many visitor hits it receives in comparision. Although technically, my way of thinking, is visitors are searches since the only reason a visitor goes to a search engine is to search.
Slightly off topic - Imagine if Google could do what Alexa is doing but somehow be able to track the visitors without the need of a toolbar to get accurate numbers. That would be a good webmaster tool. Skinny
One fact I know-- Alexa only give greade or what so called alexa rank ONLY on the bases of data collected from those system on which alexa toolbar is installed. So, Alexa is
Yeah, it will only track from people with the toolbar - however, how many people still have it installed? I don't think I know anyone who still has it because of the ammount of spyware on it. I had one PC (which I also used for software demo's) and it slowed it right down. Alexa stats say one of my sites is getting less visits, but my ISP says they are up, I can only assume this is because less people use the Alexa bar now so they consider things to be dropping in popularity.
I'd think they already have more reliable information than Alexa with the data of the Google toolbar, clickthrough data from the search engine and Adsense pageviews combined. It's just not available to us
gathering alexa like data without a toolbar might simply be impossible it would limit tha data collected from own site visited and thus give NO comparison about how many OTHER sites have been visited. to have a percentage of visits/traffic for a particular site - also data about all other sites are necessary to create the actual ranking. the more people that use alexa toolbar, the more accurate the alexa data will get. as alexa clearly publishes on one of their pages, their data to be only (near) accurate for rankings better than 100k my own experience is that relevant data really start to be more accurate with alexa ranking better than 10k while many talk about or quote alexa data - with a little bit more support FOR alexa by using alexa toolbar we all could benefit a little more personally i love the new alexa siteinfo.xml something new and unique for the benefit of site-VISITORS to instantly get a site menu for most important pages of that site
i think alexa never even thought of beating G alexa has totally different services than G hence complimenting each other and never competing each other
do we have any figures on alexa toolbar usage??? me and my brother had the toolbar installed just to bump up our alexa rank, we got it to 150k position, then once we stopped using it for his site, it is now below 5 million, the numbers could be very low, this was just for normal browsing on his site, nothing dodgy
there is another thread with a poll in THIS forum if you have some real traffic then you also get real alexa ranking real traffic means many thousand visitors per day (= some 100+k hits a day) alexa is only for large sites accurate just as they publish clearly on their site for sites being better than 100k position specially for all those asking about why no adsense $ its the first i do - a glance at alexa in my ffx no alexa ranking most of time also reslts in 1 or 2 digits $ a day frm adsense hence alexa gives an instant idea about the real traffic on a site