Is Alexa a smaller robot?

My weblogs say I am spidered by Alexa

[erikv]

Please apologize if this is a silly question, but although I have been publishing web sites for over 4 years now, it has just now become a serious undertaking in terms of trying to get traffic. So, I've never before really looked much at these logs and have also never hung around on these forums either.

I've been lurking for a few weeks and two weeks ago, I started asking questions and here and there--where I thought I could say something that makes sense (not much, I'm afraid)--have been posting stuff.

I have also been studying the searchengineworld site, but I can't trace Alexa there either. What is Alexa? Is it a robot, a major one, or is it a small robot that will not get me much traffic? Is it perhaps something completely different? I use Atomz as a site search engine--could Alexa be their robot? I don't think so, because Funnel Web Enterprise identifies Atomz as Atomz on the referrers page...

I find all this very complicated and there's much to be learned...

Thanks for any replies to this one.
erik

[korkus2000]

Heres some info on alexa

[webmasterworld.com...]

[bridge98]

Just noticed new "Alexa web search" home page.
Anyone use this toolbar ? I did for a while. My "traffic rank" jumped from 1,000,000+ after installation to 243,000 6 weeks later. I went on holiday for two weeks, the TR dropped to 300,000. As I used the toolbar again the TR climed again.:)
Maybe Amazon are preparing terrain...
Thanks to Webmasterworld for all the great information.

[erikv]

Thanks for the information! Alexa has been spidering my site a lot--about once every two weeks. But they never show up for search referrers or search terms in my logs.

[elgumbo]

Alexa also contribute their results to The Way Back Machine.

Take a look to see if your site's been archived.

http://www.archive.org/index.html

Peter

[rfgdxm1]

Looks like Alexa uses its spider for those thumbnails of the top 3 sites and the Wayback machine, but uses Google for SERPs.