Presidential Candidates

Only 21 months left in the race for president and we are calling the winner: Hillary Clinton.

Just kidding, of course. But her web site is clearly the most popular of the candidates for president.
If you take a gander at the graph here, I've used Alexa to track the relative popularity of the three leading democrat(ic) candidates' web sites. Hillary clearly has had the most visitors to her site of any candidate (blue line), particularly on the 21st of January, when she posted a video announcing her candidacy. She nearly doubled the number of visitors that had visited Barack Obama's site (for the same reason, in red) a week earlier, and more than quadrupled the visits to John Edward's site 3 weeks prior. Even today, if you look at the far right of the graph, it is clear that Hillary's site is getting quite a bit more traffic than her competitors.

Now, I know what you are thinking... isn't it a little early to start tracking the candidates... and maybe even a bit annoying? Fair point. I just can't help it. It is so easy and tempting to treat this like a horse race. I promise to restrain myself in the future and will only post about the candidates occasionally until we get a little closer to election day.

There are several other democratic candidates not listed on the graph above. At this point their sites are not getting enough traffic to show up on the chart. But, to be fair, I'd like to mention their names and Web sites, sorted in order of popularity, and wish them the best of luck in becoming the leader of the free world:

Bill Richardson: richardsonforpresident.com
Dennis Kucinich: kucinich.us
Tom Vilsack: tomvilsack08.com
Joe Biden: joebidenforpresident.org
Holy cow, there's even more...

OK, that covers the asses. What about the pachyderms?

It looks like our elephants don't know how to jump. The Republican sites are just a tiny blip on the chart. Both have approximately 10% of the traffic of the third place democratic candidate, John Edwards.

Of course there are numerous other candidates that have thrown their hat into the ring, but to list them all here would be more than I could take, and probably more than you could stand. If you are really that interested, I would suggest that a) you get a hobby, or b) find the list here.

Developer's Corner Gets a Facelift

Alexa's Developer's Corner started off about a year ago as a place where people could go to learn more about the Web Search Platform. But over the course of the year, as we continued to add new web services and cram them into the dev corner, the place has become a little cluttered. So, after procrastinating for a few months, we finally buckled down and did a little early spring cleaning. The result is a sparkling new Developer's Corner.

The new design of the dev corner is a reflection of our continuing focus on our search engine. There is now an entire section of the dev corner devoted solely to Search. We expect this to be just the beginning of a broad array of search tools for developers. Our goal is to give unparalleled and unlimited access to search. Just think of it... where else can you:

• Take the reins of a Web crawler and direct it to crawl specific pages on specific domains and collect specific document types
• Mine the documents in the crawl and generate custom indices
• Reorder search results and create custom verticals
• Use your own advertising solution

This is by no means a complete list. I just put it together to illustrate a point. Where other search engines may give you access to their search results, they will tie your hands. You won't be able to access the raw documents in their crawl, create your own index, reorder the results or even use your own advertising solution. In some extreme cases they will only provide results if you give over part of your page to their ajax script. Why would these search giants create search solutions that are obviously limited and of little use to inventors? Because they are not interested in helping to create their next competitor.

Alexa on the other hand... that's exactly what we are here to do. We are here to build a platform for you. We are designing our services to be consumed and manipulated by developers and inventors. We fully expect that the next great search engine will be unimaginable to us and won't be based on a plain vanilla search index from one of the big boys. It will be built and based on a new idea and it will require the kind of access that only Alexa can provide.

You can get started in the new and revamped Developer's Corner.

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