Forget Alexa–There are better tools.
You’ve probably heard of Ron Hornbaker’s Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic).
You probably know that the name change was forced by Alexa (Amazon), who didn’t like the fact that (i) the service was getting popular and (ii) Alexaholic has Alexa in it.
Okay, makes sense… right? Not really. Alexa is now blasting the same person they praised just over a year ago!
They’ve now SUED Ron! Crazy! This Scribd doc from Mashable has the actual court document.
He got rid of the Alexa… he complied. Now they sue him anyway.
…
Now, just a few days ago, Alexa announced that they’d be getting rid of their current API for graph use in favor of “widgets” that includes an AdBrite BritePic advertisement at the top. Ugh.
Many people have called for a boycott of Alexa. Well, I’m joining it. Who needs Alexa? Their data is blatantly wrong half the time anyway.
You may be wondering–who would take the place of Alexa? Here’s a roundup of the major competitors at this point.
- Compete (compete.com — no pun intended, I think) is both a search engine and metrics provider. Similar to Alexa, Compete gets its data from users using its free toolbar. I’ve never personally thought this was the best way to give good ratings, but I believe somewhere along the line Compete uses some fancy equation against this data to get better, more accurate results. I think Alexa probably does the same, too.
- Quantcast (quantcast.com) is “the world’s first open internet ratings service.†Quantcast I think has some serious potential. Unlike Compete’s and Alexa’s use of toolbars, Quantcast asks you to put a small Javascript script on every page of your site so your site can be “Quantified.†So, Quantcast is more of a web-analytics-turned-ranking-service, which I can’t say is a bad idea. If you choose to use the exact results on your Quantcast page, you get the exacts from your website. You can also get estimations from their “panel,†which, although isn’t 100% accurate, gives you good results too.
- Ranking.com (ranking.com) is yet another ranking service that uses its toolbar to track data, however from their website, they seem to infer that they seriously examine and alter the data they get. Not much else information is given, though. And from what I can see, Ranking.com has a substantially smaller number of those with the toolbar installed than Alexa and Compete do.
Take your pick, or pick all three. Just, please, don’t pick Alexa.
Think about it.
-Ben
(disclaimer: above roundup taken from my personal blog, BenFeldman.us)
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April 22nd, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Compete is crap, honestly the stats it gives are off by a lot - I mean I don’t know anyone who uses their toolbar as no one trusts them. Their stats are sorely off by a lot - it’s not reliable or even crediable.