Amazon will withdraw Alexa , a free service that offered statistical data on websites. It was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle – also known for being the creator of the Internet Archive – and Bruce Gilliat.
Alexa Internet was acquired by Amazon in 1999 for about $ 250 million in shares. A few years later they even had a strategic agreement with Google. Coincidentally, it has the same name as the company's virtual voice assistant.
Especially known for the Alexa Rank , a controversial ranking of the world's most popular websites, it was widely used and referenced in the late nineties and early twenty-first century. The methodology was always questionable and, as is often the case in these cases, easy to fool. The data was extracted from people with a browser extension and the websites that chose to install a few lines of code.
Alexa also launched – in part to silence criticism – a professional service called Alexa Pro . This offered a statistics certification plan on a website. The objective was to measure traffic much more accurately and allow data to be displayed such as page views or unique users.
Amazon will close Alexa Internet on May 1, 2022 . It stopped accepting new subscriptions yesterday, December 8. Those paying customers will be able to export all the account data and delete it. They managed to register more than 400 million monthly visitors, and keep a record of more than 30 million websites.
Few services were as representative of Web 1.0 as Alexa was. Currently SimilarWeb does something similar and is just as controversial. Especially since it also shows traffic data that is not necessarily close to reality.
Alexa, the virtual assistant, was originally called Ivona
Although both services of Amazon coincided with the use of the same name, the reasons and the origin of each of them were different.
Alexa , the virtual assistant of Amazon , originally called Ivona , was invented in Poland, by a company called the same , Ivona Software which they acquired in 2010. Part of the reason why they decided to change the name is because the pronunciation of the name is unusual and easy to recognize by a machine, especially due to the presence of the X .
On the other hand, the decision to use the name of Alexa by the ranking of websites that is about to close, was due to the similarity with the Library of Alexandria .
