Amazon plans to shut down Alexa Internet, the well-known Internet statistics and analytics company, by May 1 of next year, according to a brief notice from the online retailer.
Alexa Internet was created in 1996 by digital librarians Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat and was purchased by Amazon in 1999.
The firm was named after the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt, and it began as a site crawler and archiver, eventually building the Internet Archive database and adding search features and analytics under Amazon’s early ownership.
According to Kahle, one of the breakthroughs that undergird the Amazon Web Services cloud is Alexa Internet’s computer architecture for processing massive data.
In recent years, an Alexa ranking has become a measure of a website’s popularity, offering data on various traffic indicators such as daily visits and page views that the firm would validate.
Alexa first collected information via a tracking toolbar, but eventually switched to data collection using browser extensions and web page scripts. Existing Alexa members can access their data until May 1, 2022.
Amazon has not stated why Alexa Internet is being discontinued.