Surf engine Alexa 2.0 can now work with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 4.0 browser via a 45K JavaScript application. The new software loads like a web page and installs in under a minute, according to Alexa Internet president and CEO Brewster Kahle. Web users then carry on as usual. Alexa appears in a frame at the bottom of their browser, feeding them stats and information about the pages they are visiting, suggesting related links and offering lost files from its archives. We’re the only Out-Of-Print web server! says Kahle. We’re not like a portal site, he explains, we’re for when you find yourself out of the block, asking yourself: Am I where I want to be? He says he wants to raise the web from a medium to a literature. Some of Alexa’s fans have been similarly high- falutin’ in their praise, Feedmag’s Steven Johnson writing that: Shifts like these can seem minor when you first encounter them, but if other software designers begin to emulate them, they could have a profound effect on the larger web ecology. The IE announcement, though, is less about paradigm shifts than it is about browser wars. Alexa’s related links are also available through Netscape’s Navigator browser (CI No 3,422), but Kahle emphasises that: IE has the full-featured Alexa. We find it a much better integration. Alexa’s site stats are derived from its massive 12 Terabyte archive of web sites and usage patterns. That infrastructure is funded by advertising, and as Kahle points out: We can do very targeted ads. Advertisers love it because they can advertise more or less on the competitor’s site. It benefits users too because hey, you want to know what else is out there, right? After two years in business Alexa remains privately held, with a staff head count of 35. The name is short for the Library of Alexandria, and we all know how that ended. Yeah, but it lasted 500 years, Kahle chuckles. If we can last 500 years, that’ll be fine.
