you
have many options to search web but how many options do you have to find out how
popular a site is? You might have often wondered how to find
out how popular a site really is? to get some idea of how many are coming
into a site.
Answer to your search comes from the Alexa service (An
Amazon.com company). They are in existence
for several years now. Over these years, they were in the business of
ranking sites. This is probably the Internets only site ranking service
that's hugely popular. We are trying to introduce it to as many more people
as possible.
How does Alexa do it?
What alexa essentially has is a tool bar. This is a small
tool bar that installs itself on the top of your browser (Internet explorer,
netscape etc...) like your google or
yahoo tool bar. Millions of users across the world use alexa tool bar on
their browsers. As
these visitors browse internet and go from page to page and site to site, alexa gathers data
on which site is tool bar user going. This way they find out how many people are going to a
particular site.
What's your benefit?
What tool bars user gets, is a result of this previously
described work of Alexa. Through the information they keep gathering by
means of tool bars of millions of users, the are able to, on a real time
basis report the rank of a particular site back to you through your own tool
bar. This happens as we said before, in real time, automatically, and
dynamically. That's when it gets interesting.
When you are introduced to a new business or portal
or other type of site, you have no idea of whether the company or the site
you are dealing with can be trusted or whether it is actually popular.
However you can quickly get an idea of how popular the site is, and through
that the trustworthiness of the site, using alexa's rank report.
Using the tool bar, you can also quickly gather information on who the
site is owned by, which are the other sites the visitors to a particular
site is visiting etc..
This service is a free service for anyone who wish to use
it.
Rank 1 is owned by Yahoo, 2 by MSN and 3 by Google at the
time of this writing.
What's more;
Alexa has the above yet unmatched features and many more..
For sites which come under a rank
of less than 100,000 they offer much more than simple rank. You can view
daily page visit statistics and site visit statistics if you wish to learn
more about the site.
