Alexa Internet
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A 2014 screenshot of Alexa.com's home page.
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| Type of business | Wholly owned subsidiary |
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Type of site
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Web traffic and ranking |
| Available in | English |
| Founded | April 1, 1996 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Coordinates | 37°48′03″N 122°27′23″W / 37.8009°N 122.4565°WCoordinates: 37°48′03″N 122°27′23″W / 37.8009°N 122.4565°W |
| Owner | Amazon.com |
| President | Andrew Ramm |
| Key people | Dave Sherfesee (vice president) |
| Industry | Internet information providers |
| Products | Alexa Web Search (discontinued 2008) Alexa toolbar |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank |
 1,861 (Global, December 2016[update])
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| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Online |
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. This is 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. As of 2015, its website has been visited by over 6.5 million people monthly.
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. In 1999, as the company moved away from its original vision of providing an "intelligent" search engine, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for approximately US$250 million in Amazon .
Alexa began a partnership with Google in early 2002, and with the web directory DMOZ in January 2003. In May 2006, Amazon replaced Google with Bing (at the time known as Windows Live Search) as a provider of search results.
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