Alexa Internet

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based company that provides commercial web traffic data and analytics. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com.

Founded as an independent company in 1996, Alexa was acquired by Amazon in 1999. Its toolbar collects data on browsing behavior and transmits them to the Alexa website, where they are stored and analyzed, forming the basis for the company's web traffic reporting. According to its website, Alexa provides traffic data, global rankings and other information on 30 million websites, and as of 2015 its website is visited by over 6.5 million people monthly.

Operations and history

Alexa Internet was founded in April 1996 by American web entrepreneurs Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. The company's name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria of Ptolemaic Egypt, drawing a parallel between the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world and the potential of the Internet to become a similar store of knowledge.

Alexa initially offered a toolbar that gave Internet users suggestions on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community. The company also offered context for each site visited: to whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated. Alexa's operations grew to include archiving of web pages as they are crawled. This database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive accessible through the Wayback Machine. In 1998, the company donated a copy of the archive, two terabytes in size, to the Library of Congress. Alexa continues to supply the Internet Archive with Web crawls.