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Archiver > Freepages-Help > 2002-11 > 1038498557


From: Rod Dav4is <>
Subject: Re: [FreeHelp] Alexa
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 10:49:17 -0500
References: <5.1.0.14.0.20021128085616.0233e5c0@pop3.norton.antivirus>


"Bruce Casner (by way of Pat Asher )" wrote:

> I just did two searches - Google and Alexa. They came up with the same
> hits, in the same order. Not surprising, since Alexa is "powered by
> Google". Alexa appears to be a layer of advertisements on top of the
> Google search engine.

There are three operative components here:

1. The user interface: i.e. the shape of what you see as the input form with which
you compose your query, and how your result is presented.
2. The engine, which is the software that searches the index for the pages that
match your query.
3. The index, which is the data collected by a so-called spider program crawling
the pages of the web.

"Powered by Google" addresses the engine only. The indices are separate and
distinct, and your test result of the "same hits" was no doubt coincidence. Google
is an independent corporation, while Alexa is owned by Amazon.com. To my knowledge,
they do not share index information.

-R.

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