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Google is #2 in alexa

Caleb E [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, March 23, 2006
18 years ago

It's been #3 for a long time (behind yahoo (#1) and MSN (#2))
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500

on an only slightly related note, kinderstart has recieved quite a few page views of late:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3m&size=large&compare_sites=&y=r&url=http://www.kinderstart.com
but i get the feeling its not the press they were really looking for... *evil grin*

dpneal [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Interesting Caleb. Look at the top 10 though. Google has 3 sites in there; google.com, google.co.uk, blogger.com. If you add google.com and google.co.uk stats together, they are easily way out in front.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

How is the Alex data compiled? I always think they have non-representative data but I could be wrong...

Andrew Hitchcock [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Alexa is from IE users on Windows. Although, they may have recently added Firefox, I'm not sure. I think rank is a composite of viewers and page views. Yahoo is way ahead in page views, so it'll take a while still for Google to reach #1.

I use my Alexa widget to keep track of the top three (Yahoo, Google, MSN) using Google Personalized Home, so it is easy to see when changes happen.

dpneal [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

they can't track every IE user, surely?

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

They track IE users that have Alexa toolbar.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I was looking into Alexa rankings some time ago (between Sep 2004 and May 2005). They're absolute crap IMHO!

Just by using the Alexa IE toolbar, I managed to get a NON-EXISTENT website (i.e. a random domain which wasn't even registered) to rank around 1,500,000. (It entered at around 3,000,000 and took 2 weeks to climb to 1,500,000.) That might not sound like much, but it's a higher ranking than most people's personal home pages and plenty of "serious" company websites!

During the same period, my personal website jumped from a ranking of 1,800,000 to around 300,000 in just one month. After another two months, it was ranking at around 100,000! (Today it's ranking around 480,725.)

I'm not sure if it's still so easy to sway their results, but I certainly can't take them seriously after discovering all that!

Andrew Hitchcock [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Sorry, yes, you have to use the toolbar, I forgot to say that.

It is easy to sway the results when pages get few hits, but the higher you get in the rankings, the less effect you have. I think the top tier of sites is mostly accurate.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I agree. Probably sites in the top 10,000 would be hard to sway like this.

BTW, the results above were from just one person using the toolbar. If that's the affect that one person can have, imagine how much 100s or 1000s of people could sway the results.

A few of us using the toolbar managed to get another domain that we visited regularly from around 60,000 to 30,000. When we all stopped using the toolbar on a daily basis, it dropped back down to below 55,000. Now it's ranking around the 70,000 mark.

I realise that some of this change could be organic, but I still think it's too easily influenced. I seem to remember that around the time we were playing with the rankings, one of the top 100 sites was a site that was installing the toolbar / redirecting people to their site through Alexa in a malware kind of way...

dpneal [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Thanks for this information everyone. I guess it proves that although Alexa may give a very rough estimate of web usage, it just doesn't have a big enough user base for us to take the rankings as fact.

myself [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

so whats an altenative ranking to alexa?

Ricardo H. [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Today I came across this site about 'alexa' which claims Google 'finally reached second' (http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2006/04/24/google-finally-reaches-number-2-according-to-alexa/) I go to alexa.com and check up noth yahoo and Google. According to it, yahoo has been in first place for the past couple of years without coming down once (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=max&size=medium&y=t&url=yahoo.com#top) (which IMHO looks like it's made up, not saying it is, but keep reading) while Google has had its up and dows (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=max&size=medium&y=t&url=google.com#top). Some time ago (less than a month) I was reading an article about Google (I read lots about it) and it was saying how Google was No.1 with almost half of all the searches followed by yahoo with around 20% and msn with around 10%. I then say that someone must be wrong, so I search to see if what I rememberd was right, what I found was this:

http://www.onestat.com/html/msn_search_usage_share_20050926.html
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3334881
http://seo.mcdar.net/4944.php

And many other sites which claimed Google as the number 1. After reading some of the posts here, I understood that alexa bases its rank only on people that use it's toolbar, meaning it cannot be considered as a trustworthy rank since it is only a selected group that use that toolbar. (If I am not correct with this please explain and correct me since I am not sure)

Which one is correct? Or are they being measured in different categories: as the top search engine, top website. Or as the one with most searches or the one with most visits.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I don't believe the "Alexa toolbar users" group is in any way representative of the majority of web users. I often find Alexa stats to be very off for my own sites, and personally I don't look at them.

Ano [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Google rocks!

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