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Alexa Toolbar provides detailed information about the site you're visiting, including reviews, contact information, and automatic links to related sites. Busy sites will get a traffic ranking and a graph of traffic details over time.
Alexa could not exist without the participation of the Alexa Toolbar community. Each member, in addition to getting a useful tool, is giving back. Simply by using the toolbar each member contributes valuable information about the web, how it is used, what is important and what is not.
- Dynamic Toolbar - offers the unique ability to update in real-time to offer you information about the sites you visit.
- Safer Surfing! - Foil the phishers and scammers with Alexa’s one-of-a-kind real-time site information. You won’t be fooled ever again!
- Smarter Surfing - With Alexa’s patented real-time Related Links you will search less and find more on the Web. Try it and see.
Editorial Review
Alexa has the unique claim to have developed the internet’s first toolbar and continues to insist that its Alexa Toolbar is the best. Since the Alexa Toolbar is only available for use on Internet Explorer (version 5 or higher), that claim can certainly be contested, but there is always something to be said for being first. There is a plugin that works in Firefox as well.
The Alexa toolbar is used by its maker, Alexa Internet, to measure web trends by monitoring its users surfing habits. Alexa claims to have been installed on over 10 million browsers as of 2005, but Wikipedia.org lists its sample size at around 180,000 as of 2003.
The toolbar isn’t widely trusted because of some privacy concerns. Alexa freely admits that it utilizes data pulled from the users of its toolbars to make its analysis of the popularity of websites, which is known as “Alexa rank.” Webmasters often use the Alexa rank of websites to judge their popularity and importance to the web community but anecdotal evidence has suggested that this information is easily manipulated and thus unreliable.
Additionally, spyware software often treats the Alexa toolbar as spyware since Alexa collects the information about its users in this manner.
The toolbar itself is pretty barebones as far as functionality. There is a search bar that allows a basic web search as well as a site search. The toolbar also displays what Alexa regards to be related sites along the top of the toolbar, but after a small amount of use, it becomes apparent that this function is absolutely useless. For instance, upon download of the Alexa toolbar, the user is then forced to enter demographic information into a form to continue. The Alexa toolbar seems to believe that this form is similar to a Vietnamese importing and exporting website, the Better Business Bureau, and Google.
Other functions include a basic pop-up manager, an email client, and an archive lookup as well as a link to Amazon.com and Alexa.com.
Unless you are absolutely head over heels about sending information about your private browsing habits to Alexa, it is of the opinion of this reviewer that you should pass on this outdated toolbar. The Alexa Toolbar, as well as Alexa Internet represent the bygone days of the internet when companies were able to take advantage of naïve users and could make it appear like a blessing while doing so. Now users are, for the most part, more savvy so the Alexa Toolbar is on the ropes, so to speak, and it doesn’t seem as if Alexa itself cares enough to do anything about it by offering anything better. Skip this toolbar at all costs.
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