alexa.com isn't the microphone in your house that tells the government what you say.it's a website analytics utility website.I've opened the website for about 5 years. it's now, from my point of view, on version 3. version 3 has less information than the version 2 it was on 2 months ago. (version 2 had less then version 1, 5 years ago)they MONEY seem MONEY to MONEY revamp MONEY their MONEY website MONEY every MONEY so MONEY oftenI'm a casual user, just interested in a website general rankings. 2 months ago, alexa (version 2) provided me with a 12 month history. no problems. now (version 3), they don't. they've confirmed that the previous 12 month history they offered for free viewing, is now for paid accounts. free viewing is now 90 day history.version 2 also gave you a nice little latency ping number, so if you thought a site was slow, alexa would confirm that, yes, it did take 3 seconds to load and was slower than 80% of other sites. version 3 doesn't.It would be vaguely interesting to view alexa.com's 90 day ranking history on their website, to see how manypeople use it. It would be even more useful to view alexa.com's 12 months ranking history, but you can't do that anymore. (not only that but the version 2 12 month history, gave you a useful Y-axis scale on the traffic stat history. version 3's 90 day history gives you the data's minimum/maximum end points)there are some sites that give you more than the 90 day history that alexa gives. Version 2 if I recall gave website ranking up to 1 million, version 3 only goes to 100,000So, um, pay, don't pay, do whatever with this site. knock yourself out.here's a review I wrote a couple of years ago (I didn't publish), after they revamped it from version 1, to version 2.(Version 1 gave the information about which sites linked into the website you were enquiring about. version 2 removed that feature. Do you expect me to view? No Mr Bond! I expect you to pay) or, to use focus group language, "people appear to be getting value out of our site, without providing us with anything". apart from word of mouth free publicity. which I won't do anymore.alexa's email support also has an interesting format. you ask a question, the subject of their reply says "your ticket has been resolved". unless it hasn't...in which case....you reply to your resolved ticket.I can't imagine why older people (and sometimes other people) sometimes find the Internet confusingversion 2It's funny how austerity never seems to apply to imaginary software companies. or "the internet of things".alexa firmly falls into the category of sites that 99.9% of the world have never heard of, but the company only sees the traffic stats from that 0.1%, and suddenly thinks there's massive revenue to be made.The result, is that they turn a good, sensible, useable site, into a mess that has "premium membership only" written all over it. when lots of people need a screwdriver, they use a knife. alexa's tools are website information equivalent of a multimeter, and my budget for a multimeter is less than the subscription price many websites ask for.When I own a multimeter, I own a multimeter. Alexas site content changes from week to week as the programmers think of different ways they want to try and extract money. Who knows what the website is going to look like in the next weeks/months, as they try to scrabble as much perceived money from pockets as possible.At a rough glance recently alexa seems to have gone for the microsoft pencil case and rucksack, because it's changed to the cgi 2-colour green blue interface.One of the signs that alexa is not a 'normal' billing site, is that when you cancel your subscription, you loose access immediately. Most billing systems give you access until the re billing date.When you try your subscription service, you learn that it is much less cobbled together than you were hoping for. It isn't a comprehensive utility which is worth a subscription. It's a roughly collected bunch of numbers that they are trying their luck at asking money for. This review absolutely isn't stating that alexa is useless. It isn't. If the alexa site had no purpose, this review wouldn't exist. The only reason for writing this review is because the site has useful info on it, but the programmers seem to want to clutter the site up un necessarily and jump on a subscription model.Alexa.com really is..."the internet of things" (wouldn't survive if it was a high-street business).
