Alexa puts its hand up and admits its stats are bollocks!

[Rubber Duck]

Alexa's slightly more credible web stats? | PDA: The Digital Content Blog | Guardian Unlimited

At risk of really sounding like a web statistics bore, Alexa has rejigged its sources for its web traffic data and will be less reliant on the Alexa toolbar in future.

I generally give Alexa a very wide berth, I admit - that was after looking at some stats that seemed to suggest more people looked at whitehouse.org than there people on earth, or some such. Other quirks included stats that said YouTube gets more traffic than Google and there are more where they came from.

The problem is that basing estimates for web traffic on the activity of people who are willing to install a browser plug-in means your figures will be skewed towards more tech-savvy users. I should imagine the proportion of people actually willing to install that plug-in is pretty small and probably decreasing - so anyway, that has been ditched in favour of what Alexa rather obliquely describes as "aggregated data from multiple sources". I'll still refuse to use their stats until they explain exactly what their methodology is, but it's good to know they are changing.

"You gave us many other suggestions as well, and we are working hard to implement them. We won't tell any secrets just yet, but you can expect to see new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months.

"Your ranking wasn't wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users' interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites' rankings were unaffected by such differences, we've worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.

"The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of web users."

TechCrunch noted that the new system ranks tech blogs lower but political blogs higher.