As some of you have noticed, we temporarily stopped updating Alexa traffic information on January 31. We discovered some anomalies in the traffic rankings, including some inexplicable drops in traffic for a number of sites in China. We decided to halt the traffic updates until we resolved the issue. We expect to correct the problems later this evening. Thank you for your patience!

Summer is over and I am putting together my to-do list for Alexa, trying to figure out what we are going to be working on for the next year. But before I break out my pencil, I thought I'd ask you first. If you have about a minute and a half, take this brief survey and tell me what's on the top of your Alexa wish list: Survey Thanks.

Now that Fred Thompson has )finally( officially announced that he is running for the presidency, we can check his Web site's Alexa stats to see how popular he is with the online crowd. It turns out that he is popular. Here is the graph of the republican candidates: That red line with the big spike... that is Fred08.com.

Tennis was very popular when I was growing up. We had all the big stars like Connors, McEnroe and Borg. And the ladies were popular too, with Evert and Navratilova. Golf on the other hand was much less popular. Tennis waxed and Golf waned. Over the last 10 years or so, courses have changed. Golf is very popular now and tennis.... not so much.

For years sales, bizdev and marketing folks have used Alexa to identify sites in their target market and contact them. Alexa has been great at the first half of that equation - identifying sites - and poor at the second half. The contact info available on Alexa has been meager at best. Now, we have partnered with Jigsaw to complete the equation. 500,

I see this line in blogs just about every day: "How to boost your Alexa Rank." They are inevitably filled with misguided musings posted by fools who can't be bothered to learn the facts before blathering about some get-rich-quick scheme. Here's a perfect example. In this blog post, he says you can boost your rank EASILY by following his simple steps. That post was from August 9th,

As I mentioned in my last blog post, the traction that candidates get online, don't always follow when it comes to make a choice at the ballot box. But, in the case of the Democrats, there is a clear alignment. The 3 leading candidates all have ranks well within the Alexa Top 100,000 sites, while the rest, all fall well outside that mark.

Howard Dean's presidential campaign of 2004 seemed to prove that popularity on the Internet doesn't translate into votes in the primaries. Dean, by far the most popular candidate on the net, simply couldn't get the votes. Why the discrepancy? Is the Internet a skewed demographic that doesn't represent the voting public at large? Do people play it safe when they get to the ballot box?

We've had one or two folks ask us what is going on here at Alexa... the data looks to be out-of-date and customer service isn't responding. Did something go wrong? The answer is not very exciting. Our data center suffered a power outage a few days ago and it set us back by a day. Our traffic stats are a day behind now and should be current within the next few hours.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Alexa Toolbar, originally released on July 17, 1997. Do you remember what the Net looked like back then? Netscape was the most popular browser. AOL had released it's first Instant Messenger program in Beta. Jodie Foster's new movie Contact was number one at the box office.

Perhaps you noticed... Alexa has a new look today. New Headers - At the very top of the page you'll notice that Alexa's search box is placed inside a new box with easy navigation. This should make it easier to navigate around the site from rankings, to search to directory, etc. By the way, have you tried Alexa's search lately?