Fortune Global 500

The Fortune Global 500, also known as Global 500, is an annual ranking of the top 500 corporations worldwide as measured by revenue. The list is compiled and published annually by Fortune magazine.

Until 1989, it listed only non-US industrial corporations under the title "International 500" while the Fortune 500 contained and still contains exclusively US corporations. In 1990, U.S. companies were added to compile a truly global list of top industrial corporations as ranked by sales. Since 1995, the list has had its current form, listing also top financial corporations and service providers by revenue.

From 2001 to 2012, there was a significant change in the geographical distribution of the companies in the Global 500 rankings. The number of North American-based companies reduced from 215 in 2001 to 144 in 2011, and the contribution of Asian-based companies increased rapidly from 116 in 2001 to 188 in 2012. Most of this growth is accounted for by the rapid increase in the number of Chinese Global 500 companies, of which there were 98 by 2015 (increasing from only 10 in 2001) The share of European-based companies increased marginally, from 158 to 160, over the decade.

Global 500

Global 500 may refer to:

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.