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Everyone knows about Google, the search engine that returns remarkably well directed results.
Less well known is Alexa (see the link box in the upper right corner of this article), a marriage of browser technology, Google, and Amazon.
Alexa web search -- a new kind of search engine. With traffic rankings, user reviews and other information about sites, Alexa is a web site discovery tool. Alexa web search combines the powerful Google search engine with Alexa's comprehensive site information and puts it all inside an Amazon.com interface. - Alexa site
In Alexa Meets Google (see the link box again), SearchEngineWatch.com provides a brief history of the Alexa service.
Many people know Alexa as a web browser add-on tool, technically termed a "browser companion" that's downloaded as a toolbar. It's designed to help with web navigation, provide site information, and find related sites. Alexa was started by Internet pioneer Brewster Kahle in the mid-90s. Brewster is also the founder of The Internet Archive, providers of The Wayback Machine web archive and The Television Archive. Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com during 1999.
An Alexa search on the single word 'chess' (link box) returns almost the same results as a Google search on 'chess'.
Why 'almost'?
While the first few chess sites returned by the two search engines appear to be the same, Alexa reported 2,080,000 results for chess while Google reported 3,400,000.
These numbers may be subject to random factors.
A few days later Alexa reported 3,100,000 against Google's 4,150,000.
Whatever the real number of chess pages on the Web, our interest here is in the sites that Alexa/Google considers to be the top chess sites.
The three top sites
- US Chess Federation (www.uschess.org)
- Chess.net (www.chess.net)
- Internet Chess Club (www.chessclub.com)
are set apart from the rest of the pack with small images of the site's home page.
Let's take a look at the data that Alexa combines with Google search accuracy.
Alexa/Google's Top Chess Site : USchess.org
The top chess site according to Google and Alexa is the United States Chess Federation (www.uschess.org), the 'Official website and online store for the US Chess Federation. The USCF is the official sanctioning body for tournament chess in ...', and carries an 'Average User Review' of three stars out of a maximum five. Along with this is a link to the cached page on Google plus a link cryptically named [Site info].
Mouseover on [Site info] tells us that
- 'People who visit this page also visit: Fide, Internet Chess Club, R&D; Publishing/SmartChess'
with an invitation to 'See more related links'. It continues
- 'About this site: Traffic Rank: 72,153, Sites that link here: 1,024, Speed: Fast (60th percentile), Online Since: 01-Sep-1995'
which is already a lot more information than Google gives us about the USCF site!
Click on [Site info] tells us that
- the site 'Includes news, tournament information, publications, club listings, online store, ratings, top players, club rules, and links'.
- 'People who visit this page also visit:' listing 10 sites each with its own [Site info]. 'See more Related Links' leads to a grand total of 20 related sites.
- 'People who are interested in this site also bought:' listing 7 titles with links to Amazon.com. 'See more products' leads to a random Amazon product page. It turns out that the full list of 7 titles is also generated randomly : it changes every time the page is refreshed.
along with
- 'Contact Info'
- 'All Reviews for uschess.org' (consisting of one review dated 1999 which alone gives the three star rating.)
- 'Similar sites by category'
The stats displayed on the mouseover are repeated with further links for [Traffic Details] and [Sites Linking in].
[Traffic Details] has a six month graph of daily traffic plus tables of calculated stats.
- Traffic Rank for uschess.org ('The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).')
The USCF 'Traffic Rank: 72,153' means that of the millions of sites on the Internet, Alexa ranks the USCF site number 72,153 in terms of traffic.
- Where do people go on uschess.org? ('Traffic is computed for sites, which are typically defined at the domain level. For example, the Web hosts www.msn.com, carpoint.msn.com and slate.msn.com are all treated as part of the same site, because they all reside on the same domain, msn.com.')
- Reach for uschess.org : ('Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site.')
- Page Views for uschess.org: ('Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users.')
[Sites Linking in] lists names, addresses, and [Site info] for the 1024 sites linked to uschess.org.
The order of the sites is determined by the linking site's own 'Traffic Rank', which explains why the first site in the list is a Yahoo page in Danish : Yahoo.com is the top ranked site on the entire Web.
Top-200 Chess Sites
Having ample time on our hands, we decided to look at the Top-200 chess sites returned by Alexa.
We had originally planned to present an overview of the top sites for this article, with incoming links and traffic ranks for each site, but this violates the Alexa terms of use.
'Material from the Service and from any other Service owned, operated, controlled, or licensed by Alexa may not be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way.'
Let's look instead at two sites near and dear to your About Chess Guide.
The first site is About Chess itself (chess.about.com), listed at 16 in the Top-200.
We discovered that About Chess is in good company : 'People who visit this page also visit: Chess Informant, Chess is Fun, and Internet Chess Club'.
Our stats were
Traffic Rank: 86
Sites that link here: 207
Speed: Very Slow (11th percentile)
Online Since: 12-Mar-1999
Does this mean that About Chess is the 86th most popular site on the entire Web?
No, it doesn't.
Alexa calculates traffic based on the domain name : About.com.
The entire family of About.com sites taken together -- from aids.about.com to worldsoccer.about.com and including chess.about.com -- is ranked 86th by Alexa.
The 207 'Sites that link here', however, counts only sites that link directly to chess.about.com.
How do we know this?
CorrespondenceChess.com was listed three times in the Top-200.
Alexa stats for CorrespondenceChess.com
Alexa/
Google
rank |
URL |
Links |
Traffic
Rank |
| 74 |
www.correspondencechess.com |
214 |
177843 |
| 183 |
www.correspondencechess.com/cja |
214 |
177843 |
| 199 |
ccn.correspondencechess.com |
46 |
177843 |
Note that although each entry has a different URL, all three entries have the same traffic rank.
The first two, under subdomain www.correspondencechess.com, have the same number of incoming links, while the third, under subdomain ccn.correspondencechess.com, has considerably less.
The second site is our history of the World Chess Championship (www.mark-weeks.com), listed at 126 in the Top-200.
- Traffic Rank: 1,011,481
- Sites that link here: 82
- Speed: Not available
- Online Since: 29-Sep-1999
- 'People who visit this page also visit: Chess Federation of Canada, Fantasy Chess, National Open Chess Festival'
The detailed description of Alexa traffic rankings warns that
'Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant.'
'Traffic Details' tells us that the three month average of page views per user is 4.8 and the page view rank is 955,846.
How does this relate to real page views?
We know from our own server stats that the site delivered about 125,000 pages over the last three months.
Keeping in mind Alexa's warning that their stats are 'not statistically significant', that means approximately 955,000 sites delivered at least 125,000 pages over the same period.
Incidentally, the site's three month number is down from 140,000 during the same period a year ago, marking the first year-over-year decline in traffic growth.
Page views saw a big decline at the beginning of the war against Iraq and haven't fully recovered yet.
When the world wages war, the greatest of war games is an insignificant casualty.
We couldn't find any warning on Alexa, but the count of incoming links is also subject to statistical interpretation.
The following table adds stats gathered by Marketleap Link Popularity (link box again) from different search engines.
Incoming links counted by different search engines
Alexa/
Google
links |
URL List |
Alltheweb |
AltaVista |
Google/
AOL |
HotBot/
Inktomi |
MSN |
Total |
| 207 |
chess.about.com |
8,517 |
2,854 |
907 |
1,074 |
1,054 |
14,406 |
| 82 |
www.mark-weeks.com |
223 |
171 |
1 |
181 |
172 |
748 |
It's hard to make any sense out of the wide variations in link counts.
Is there a practical use for the service?
Much of the previous discussion is mainly of interest to web site owners.
What's the practical value of Alexa to the rest of the Internet community?
One use is an alternative way to browse chess sites.
Many of us follow this path in browsing the Web.
- Enter key word(s) in a search engine.
- Browse the list of sites returned by the engine.
- Click on something interesting.
- Return to the list.
- Click on something else.
Repeat (4) and (5) until we find what we want -or- enter different key word(s) -or- give up and do something else.
With Alexa, we can click on something interesting, then click on the related sites.
We know that the sites as a group were somehow attractive to people sharing our interest.
This works even better for more specific search terms like chess openings or chess shopping.
Speaking of shopping, two Amazon pages appeared in the list of Top-200 chess sites.
Both pages were for books, indicating that these are among the most popular chess books sold today.
Since there are other online sources than Amazon, here are links to the mySimon comparison shopping pages for both books.
If you're looking for a good book for a novice or intermediate player, the combined power of Alexa, Google, and Amazon suggests that these deserve consideration.
***
We covered a lot of territory in this article.
Watch for companion articles where we use Alexa to identify specialized chess resources on the Web.
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