Amazon shutters website ranking service Alexa Internet

Amazon intends to close down Alexa Internet, the well-known Internet statistics and analytics provider, by May 1 next year, the online retailer said in a brief announcement.

Alexa Internet was founded by digital librarian Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999.

The company took its name from the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt, and operated as a site crawler and archiver initally, creating the Internet Archive database, adding search functionality and analytics during the early years of Amazon ownership.

Kahle said Alexa Internet's computing infrastructure for processing big data was one of the innovations that underpinned the Amazon Web Services cloud.

In recent years, an Alexa ranking had become a measure of websites' popularity, providing data on different traffic metrics such as daily visitors and page views that the company would certify.

Alexa collected the statistics with a tracking toolbar initially, and later on moved to data gathering with browser extensions and web page scripts.

Existing Alexa subscribers can download their data up until 1 May 2022.

Amazon did not say why it is closing down Alexa Internet.