Alexa Sparky - How it works

Prior to my Firefox conversion a few years ago I used a tool called Alexa Toolbar with internet explorer. The tool now has a Firefox version called Alexa Sparky and it's much better than I remember it. Alexa Sparky produces a small number and graph at the lower right hand corner of the Firefox browser. The number indicates traffic rank for a site, the smaller the better. For example, Zune Scene is currently number 73,000. This means that of all the websites on the entire world, Zune Scene ranks in the top 70K. Last year during the Zune release, Zunescene recorded 260,000 pageviews in a single day and ranked within the top 10,000 websites in the world (for a day).

How does it work? The toolbar records all your browsing and sends it back to Alexa which then extrapolates that data to get an idea how many people visit your site. It's popular for people who own websites to install, therefore webmaster related sites get biased results. The big news today is that Alexa Sparky is available for Firefox so I can start using it again.













This page explains the definition and purpose of the alexa sparky toolbar for Firefox.