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Operations and history
Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and
Bruce Gilliat. The company offered a toolbar that gave
Internet users guidance on where to go next, based on the
traffic patterns of its user community. Alexa 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. Engineers at Alexa, in
cooperation with the Internet Archive, created the Internet
Archive's Wayback Machine. Alexa also supplies the Internet
Archive with web crawls.
In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about $250
million in Amazon stock.
The company's premises are in Building 37 of the Presidio of
San Francisco.
Alexa began a partnership with Google in spring 2002, and
with the Open Directory Project in January 2003. Live Search
replaced Google as a provider of search results in May 2006.
In September 2006, they began using their own Search
Platform to serve results. In December 2006, they released
Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it is the first major
application to be built on their Web Platform.
Alexa also provides "site info" for the A9.com search
engine.
In December 2005, Alexa opened its extensive search index
and web-crawling facilities to third party programs through
a comprehensive set of web services and APIs. These could be
used, for instance, to construct vertical search engines
that could run on Alexa's own servers or elsewhere.
Uniquely, their Web Search Platform gives developers access
to their raw crawl data. In May 2007, Alexa changed their
API to require comparisons be limited to 3 sites, reduced
size embedded graphs be shown using Flash, and mandatory
embedded BritePic ads.
In April 2007, Alexa v. Hornbaker was filed to stop
trademark infringement by the statsaholic service. In the
lawsuit, Alexa alleges that Hornbaker is stealing traffic
graphs for profit, and that the primary purpose of his site
is to display graphs that are generated by Alexa's servers.
Hornbaker removed the term Alexa from his service name on
March 19, 2007.
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