There are articles on the web and anti-spyware tools flagging the Alexa toolbar as spyware. I decided to get to the bottom of this story and run some tests myself on what the Alexa toolbar is really up to. I have used this blog as a site traffic source for this study as well as a single computer running Microsoft Windows XP Home and Internet Explorer 6.028. Here were the stats before downloading and beginning to use the Alexa toolbar:

Day 1: Notes: on this day the Alexa rating for this blog was 329,008. The first action I took was to change the home page for the browser to this blog page. Whenever I would want to navigate back and check to see if there were comments or that the other writers that contribute to this blog (logspirit and badSol). I noticed that with normal browsing activity that the Alexa rating for this blog was steadily getting better. I didn’t take another screenshot until nearly one month later.

1/18/2004 update (Day 26): Interestingly the rating had climbed with normal browsing activity by nearly half (47.4% improvement!). This drew my attention and while initially I wasn’t intending to watch this score as closely, I began from this point to watch it much more closely. Within 1 day the score flucuated again:

1/19/2004: (Day 27): At this point I decided that every time I noticed the numbers changing I would grab a screenshot of the rating.

1/23/04: (Day 31): Now my original score over 30 days had been cut in half, rising above the ratings of some of the other sites in my bookmarks. I was curious what would happen over the next 30 days. Would this score continue the downward trend with the same single browser activity? The toolbar was only installed on one machine and no others. I was doing this study with the assumption that this machine had been compromised and I didn’t want to infect other machines, nor did I want to skew the results from doing what I normally do. I even mentioned on my radio show a few times that I was watching my Alexa rating for one of my sites get better without any additional effort on my part.

1/25/04: (Day 33) A minor bump, still heading downward.

2/2/04: (Day 41): I started to notice a pattern developing of the Alexa ratings updating on Sundays and Mondays more frequently than other days, so I wondered if this was the day that the database was recalculating the ratings and the other days were more or less guesses issued by the system. Purely speculation on my part.

2/4/04 (Day 43): The rating had now climbed by more than 200,000 in nearly a month and a half of tracking. How could this be? I started analyzing the traffic. Had my traffic increased by a proportionate amount? No. It had gone up in this amount of time, but it hadn’t more than doubled. There was one peak time where during the Janet Jackson Superbowl debacle where the traffic was skewed and this site received a huge bump in traffic, but otherwise there had been no other huge spikes in traffic; a steady increase in traffic, but not commiserate with the rate of the Alexa rating going down.

2/9/04 (Day 48): Monday and the ranking went down another 10,000+. I was beginning to smell getting into the top 100,000 for this blog. How long would it take for this to happen? The answer would be coming, although at a slower rate.

2/15/04 (Day 54): I figured with the next update I had an outside chance to get into the top 100,000.

2/20/04 (Day 59): Knocking on the door, but not there. I started to wonder if I’d finally gotten near to the true ranking, because the updates were slowing down to be once a week (Sunday or Monday) and then two days later I cracked it.

2/22/04 (Day 61):

A total of 61 days to make it from 329,008 to the top 100,000 list (that Alexa sells to anyone for $2,499, btw). Now that I made it to the top 100,000 list it was time to evaluate the spyware issues this computer system had endured. Throughout this study I had been running Ad-Aware and Spybot’s S&D and both were going nuts flagging various Alexa registry entries. I chose not to quarantine these throughout the study.

Did this post make you go hmm?

Maybe Related Posts (plugin generated)

• Film Affinity recommendations engine
• Tabbed browsing in IE via MSN Toolbar
• Add an Alexa Traffic Stats graph to your website or blog
• Alexa Web Service wait continues
• Getting more interactive, go ahead and grade me
• Netcraft toolbar adds Risk Rating