Whereis Alexa?

We've had one or two folks ask us what is going on here at Alexa... the data looks to be out-of-date and customer service isn't responding. Did something go wrong?

The answer is not very exciting. Our data center suffered a power outage a few days ago and it set us back by a day. Our traffic stats are a day behind now and should be current within the next few hours. As to our customer service response time, we are backed up. With the release of Sparky, an increase in the number of requests to update site info and the recent outage, you can imagine the volume. Please be patient. We expect Customer Service to be caught up within the week.

But thanks for asking. It is good to know you are paying attention.

Sparky Add-on for Firefox Released Today

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Alexa Toolbar, originally released on July 17, 1997. Do you remember what the Net looked like back then? Netscape was the most popular browser. AOL had released it's first Instant Messenger program in Beta. Jodie Foster's new movie Contact was number one at the box office. Take a stroll through the past on the Wayback Machine to see what it looked like: Netscape. Yahoo. Excite.

To mark this historic day Alexa is releasing our first FireFox compatible toolbar, called Sparky. (Why Sparky?) Here's what it has:

• Sparkline - A very small condensed traffic history graph. Gives you a quick view to show whether the site is moving up or down.
• Rank - Shows the traffic rank of the site.
• Reach Indicator - Provides a qualitative view of whether a site's rank is good or bad.
• Related Links - Provides up to 10 Related links in the browser's File | Edit | View menu.
• Shortcuts - Clicking on Sparky brings up a menu of other handy shortcuts, including Alexa Detail pages, Cached Pages, Search Pages and more.

If you have a Firefox browser, go here to see Sparky and give it a run. Don't forget to tell your friends and colleagues. The more of you that use Sparky the better Alexa's Traffic Measurement data will be.

Here's looking forward to another ten years.