Alexa Internet

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on web traffic to other websites. Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. The company offered a toolbar that gave Internet users guidance on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community. Alexa also offered context for each site visited: to whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated. Engineers at Alexa, in cooperation with the Internet Archive, created the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Alexa also supplies the Internet Archive with web crawl. In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about $250 million in Amazon stock. The company's premises are in Building 37 of the Presidio of San Francisco. Alexa began a partnership with Google in spring 2002, and with the Open Directory Project in January 2003.... full article at wikipedia