A9's toolbar and Alexa data

A9's toolbar does seem to connect to Alexa

[Wail]

Elsethread I've seen people speculate that the A9 toolbar records usage figures like Alexa.

It's probably in the T&C's of the toolbar that A9 records usage but I've only just gotten around to testing whether it actually, currently, does so.

It seems to.

Here's my netstat with the Alexa Toolbar:
TCP bart:1257 data.alexa.com:http ESTABLISHED

And with A9 (without the Alexa bar, of course):
TCP bart:1335 data.alexa.com:http ESTABLISHED

It's not surprising to see different ports. They're probably assigned one as required - you'd get different ones for more than one IExplorer session.

Still. This is just a quickie. It'd be good if someone else confirmed the results.

[jeremy goodrich]

Makes sense that they would correlate the two. Who knows how much Google does the same with their PageRank display?

Probably gives some interesting and or useful data about webstructures, and folks that are overly obsessed with their own rankings...if we know that we can install the A9 toolbar, and inflate our own A9 rankings with it, then why wouldn't we download, install, and surf our own little interlinked network of sites on a cron job or scheduled task? ;)

Then, they can sift through the log files, and spot the "offenders" who were overly concerned with rank, and bam! we've got a few hundred folks on WebmasterWorld who come running, shouting "my a9 rankings dropped! What do I do? Amazon_Dude, where are you?"...

that's when they've arrived into the mainstream, of course.

[Wail]

Then, they can sift through the log files, and spot the "offenders" who were overly concerned with rank, and bam!

But the Alexa toolbar doesn't seem to be that smart.

I'm fairly sure my hobby site's Alexa rank is just due to me using the Alexa toolbar (fairly) and being on my own site a lot! (I'd be there even more if I didn't have to use the webhost's phpMyAdmin to manage the SQL database). If I go on hols for a weekend I loose about 200,000 Alexa places for the day's results.

The interesting thing is that the A9 toolbar doesn't display the Alexa rank. I wish it did. I had though that lack of rank detail was to ensure there was still some incentive to use the Alexa toolbar (since the pop-up blocker is not very good).

I do think Amazon reviews will be something to look at, though. They'll help organise the web. And I wonder if the diary feature on the toolbar will do the same thing.