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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 behaviour and transmits them to the Alexa website, where they are stored and analyzed, forming 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,〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.alexa.com/company )〕 and as of 2015 its website is visited by over 6.5 million people monthly.〔 ==Operations and history== 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.〔(【引用サイトリンク】date=October 19, 1998 )〕 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 stock. 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. In December 2006, Amazon released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it was the first major application built on the company's Web platform. 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. In May 2007, Alexa changed their API to limit comparisons to three websites, reduce the size of embedded graphs in Flash, and add mandatory embedded BritePic advertisements. In April 2007, the lawsuit ''Alexa v. Hornbaker'' was filed to stop trademark infringement by the Statsaholic service. In the lawsuit, Alexa alleged that Hornbaker was stealing traffic graphs for profit, and that the primary purpose of his site was to display graphs that were generated by Alexa's servers. Hornbaker removed the term Alexa from his service name on March 19, 2007. On November 27, 2008, Amazon announced that Alexa Web Search was no longer accepting new customers, and that the service would be deprecated or discontinued for existing customers on January 26, 2009. Thereafter, Alexa became a purely analytics-focused company. On March 31, 2009, Alexa launched a major website redesign. The redesigned site provided new web traffic metrics—including average page views per individual user, bounce rate, and user time on site. In the following weeks, Alexa added more features, including visitor demographics, clickstream and search traffic statistics. Alexa introduced these new features to compete with other web analytics services. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Alexa Internet」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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