Before Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa was the web's popularity scoreboard
Long before anyone asked a smart speaker about the weather, Alexa meant something else: a San Francisco company that ranked websites by traffic. Named after the ancient Library of Alexandria, it also crawled and saved web pages, and those copies seeded the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat founded Alexa Internet in April 1996. The name was meant to suggest that the internet might become what Alexandria's library was for the ancient world, the largest store of knowledge anywhere. Its first product was a toolbar that suggested where to browse next based on what other users did, and showed who owned a site, how many pages it had, and how many other sites linked to it.
To power that, Alexa ran a crawler that visited and copied pages, and the resulting archive became the foundation of the Internet Archive. In 1998 it gave the Library of Congress a two-terabyte copy. The following year, having drifted from its goal of an intelligent search engine, it was bought by Amazon for roughly 250 million dollars in stock.
Under Amazon it tried many things: partnerships with Google and the DMOZ directory, an open set of web services that let others build search engines on its index, and an image search. By 2009 it had become purely an analytics company, and its Alexa Rank, based on daily visitors and page views over three months, was treated by many big sites as the standard measure of online popularity. The data came from a sample of users running its toolbar, later browser extensions, plus sites that installed an Alexa script.
The owner's attention eventually moved elsewhere. Amazon already held the Alexa trademarks when it unveiled a virtual assistant of that name in November 2014. In December 2021 it announced the end of the ranking service after more than 25 years, and on May 1, 2022, it shut down; the old domain now points to smart speaker products.
Source: Alexa Internet
