Alexa Toolbar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Alexa Toolbar, an application produced by Alexa Internet, is a Browser Helper Object for Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows that is used by Alexa to measure website statistics. It includes a popup blocker, a search engine entry box, a link to Amazon.com, a link to Alexa, information about the current Alexa ranking of the website that the user is visiting, and links relevant to the site the user is browsing. By early 2005 there had been over 10 million downloads of the toolbar, according to Alexa. But Alexa doesn't provide info on how many of them are actually used. According to one estimate made in Mar 2003 [1] Alexa had a sample size of 180,000.

There are some privacy concerns about the toolbar, as it requests site data from Alexa and there is no information on how long Alexa stores these usage trails. Because of this, many anti-spyware programs label it as such. Though it is usually installed willingly, third-parties sometimes distribute the toolbar or access Alexa's API.

A third party has created a plugin for the Firefox browser that provides the user with the Alexa ranking and Google PageRank of the currently visited site and also requests site information from Alexa, which they use in their website statistics.^[1]