The Web wants to tell you a little bit about itself. At least that's the mission of a new service from San Francisco start-up Alexa Internet. A free, advertising-supported "intelligent navigation service," Alexa acts as a browsing companion, providing contextual site information via a slim Windows toolbar.
The toolbar software, available in a beta version from Alexa's Web site, receives and presents information independently from a user's browser and offers a range of basic data and site ratings.
"It's a navigation service that gets better as the Web grows and as there are more users," said Alexa Internet president and co-founder Brewster Kahle, who also founded WAIS Inc., an electronic publishing company sold to America Online in 1995. "Other people have found good things and not so good things," he said. "And as the discernment of users gets better, Alexa gets better."
The "meta-data" provided by Alexa is oriented around two questions: Where am I and where should I go next? The first question is answered via such details as ratings of a site's server speed, popularity, and content freshness, and what paths users tend to follow through the site. The second question is answered with a list of links to related sites others have frequented.
In drawing conclusions about sites, Alexa bases its ratings and recommendations on an analysis of patterns within the Web at large - as indicated by the preponderance of links to a particular site, for example. It also builds its opinions by tracking the usage "paths" of other Alexa users.
Jerry Michalski, managing editor of industry newsletter Release 1.0, likes what he sees and says Alexa has no direct parallel, even in agent-oriented sites recommendation services like Firefly.
The general browsing population, Michalski believes, will take to it when it sees that rather than an overview map provided by directories like Yahoo, Alexa is a map with a localized structure. "Wherever you happen to be, it gives you the major roads out," he said. "That's pretty useful."
Alexa's Web analysis is based on a massive "copy of the Web" - an archive of all sites that have existed since early 1996. Already exceeding 5 terabytes in size, the company says the archive is updated with a new Web "snapshot" about every 60 days.
But Alexa's techniques raise some questions about the service's mechanics and even user privacy. For one thing, it's a service that gains intelligence as it is used, and its ratings can't yet draw on a wealth of Alexa-tracked "usage paths." To remedy this, Alexa editors are manually ensuring that "top Web sites" start out with appropriate ratings.
As far as the privacy of information on users' paths through the Web, Kahle says Alexa doesn't know who the users are - only what they're doing. "It's not that we don't exchange information [on a user's identity and behavior] - we don't have the information to exchange."
An additional feature similar to Excite's PAL chat service or AOL's instant messaging, Alexa's chat system can tell a browser who's online, and let them send messages in real-time.
Forrester Research senior analyst Mark Hardie says Alexa's success depends on its positioning versus directories and search engines. Alexa will have to make it clear that it's a navigation hub, educating Web users that "we're not about searching, we're about helping you get around."
The Web, as it continues to explode in content, may require the intelligence of a mass surfing population to help assess its content, as directories can only tally so much. "The richest directory that we know of points to less than 1 percent of all Web pages," Kahle said. That, he believes, leaves a lot of room for his service's approach.
