I just wanted to tell my story about how Alexa helped me access medical assistance from my daughter who lives 4 1/2 hours away... Her husband had purchased, set up, and linked my device to their's so I would be able to access there home.
I have been having mobility issues so I was attempting to bring my coffee cup (with some coffee in it) to my kitchen sink... unforturnately I had lost my footing and my knees gave out and I fell on the floor... I wasn't sure what to do... I didn't know what time it was and how long I would have had to lay there on the floor til my husband got home, and that was if he didn't have to work late. I called for help from downstairs not knowing if anyone was home... I was not able to get up because of my leg issues and I was not able to get up on my knees due to medical issues with them too.
I scooched and dragged myself into my living room and was going to see if I could get to my phone or yell for help again cause our porch door was opened and kids were walking home from school so if I yelled again I hoped someone would send me help... I scooched and pulled myself a little further and then I remembered about my Echo device with Alexa... I yelled: "Alexa, announce"... I waited for it to respond to say my announcement... at that time I yelled "Heather, I fell and I need help. I cant get up and get my phone"... so I waited to see if there was a response from my daughter... 4 minutes went by and there was no response, so I decided to give it a try again. I then activated Alexa again and said "Heather, I fell, I need help, and I need you to call dad"... OMG she responded at that time (she has it linked to her phone and she was in her grocery store and got a notification about the Alexa. She said "do you need me to contact 911?"... I said yes, I fell, I can't get up and my phone and then call dad"... about 2 minutes later (but it seemed like forever) she responded back: I got ahold of Saratoga County EMS and they are sending an ambulance and now I will try and get ahold of dad"... unfortunately as he was going to answer his phone it had died (he didn't hear the first call because he was around loud equipment)... he was able to get his phone to the charger and he got a call from Saratoga County EMS and let them know what was going on and the Chief of Police went to my husband and told him again and asked him if he wanted him to take my husband to the house... I am so thankful for the Echo Alexa and I was able to get help from my daughter (4 1/2 hours away) and it saved me from laying on the floor for I had no idea how long cause I wasn't able to see a clock... as a matter of fact is probably would have been around 2+ hours... Thank you, thank you, and thank you again.

alexa.com isn't the microphone in your house that tells the government what you say.

It's a website analytics utility website.

I've opened the website for about 5 years. It's now, from my point of view, on version 3. Version 3 has less information than the version 2 it was on 2 months ago

They MONEY seem MONEY to MONEY revamp MONEY their MONEY website MONEY every MONEY so MONEY often

I'm a casual user, just interested in a website general rankings. 2 months ago, alexa (version 2) provided me with a 12 month history. No problems.

Now (version 3), they don't. They've confirmed that the previous 12 month history they offered for free viewing, is now for paid accounts. Free viewing is now 90 day history.

Version 2 also gave you a nice little latency ping number, so if you thought a site was slow, alexa would confirm that, yes, it did take 3 seconds to load and was slower than 80% of other sites. Version 3 doesn't.

It would be vaguely interesting to view alexa.com's 90 day ranking history on their website, to see how many people use it. It would be even more useful to view alexa.com's 12 months ranking history, but you can't do that anymore. (not only that but the version 2 12 month history, gave you a useful Y-axis scale on the traffic stat history. Version 3's 90 day history gives you the data's minimum/maximum end points)

Version 2 if I recall gave website ranking up to 1 million, version 3 only goes to 100,000

So, um, pay, don't pay, do whatever with this site. Knock yourself out.

Here's a review I wrote a couple of years ago (I didn't publish), after they revamped it from version 1, to version 2.

(Version 1 gave the information about which sites linked into the website you were enquiring about. Version 2 removed that feature. Do you expect me to view? No Mr Bond! I expect you to pay) or, to use focus group language, "people appear to be getting value out of our site, without providing us with anything". Apart from word of mouth free publicity. Which I won't do anymore.

Alexa's email support also has an interesting format. You ask a question, the subject of their reply says "your ticket has been resolved". Unless it hasn't... in which case... you reply to your resolved ticket. I can't imagine why older people (and sometimes other people) sometimes find the Internet confusing

Version 2

It's funny how austerity never seems to apply to imaginary software companies. Or "the internet of things".

Alexa firmly falls into the category of sites that 99.9% of the world have never heard of, but the company only sees the traffic stats from that 0.1%, and suddenly thinks there's massive revenue to be made.

The result, is that they turn a good, sensible, useable site, into a mess that has "premium membership only" written all over it. When lots of people need a screwdriver, they use a knife. Alexa's tools are website information equivalent of a multimeter, and my budget for a multimeter is less than the subscription price many websites ask for.

When I own a multimeter, I own a multimeter. Alexas site content changes from week to week as the programmers think of different ways they want to try and extract money. Who knows what the website is going to look like in the next weeks/months, as they try to scrabble as much perceived money from pockets as possible.

At a rough glance recently alexa seems to have gone for the microsoft pencil case and rucksack, because it's changed to the cgi 2-colour green blue interface.

One of the signs that alexa is not a 'normal' billing site, is that when you cancel your subscription, you loose access immediately. Most billing systems give you access until the re billing date. When you try your subscription service, you learn that it is much less cobbled together than you were hoping for.

It isn't a comprehensive utility which is worth a subscription. It's a roughly collected bunch of numbers that they are trying their luck at asking money for.

This review absolutely isn't stating that alexa is useless. It isn't. If the alexa site had no purpose, this review wouldn't exist. The only reason for writing this review is because the site has useful info on it, but the programmers seem to want to clutter the site up un necessarily and jump on a subscription model.

Alexa.com really is..."the internet of things" (wouldn't survive if it was a high-street business).

Alexa should implement on SEO tools

http://www.alexa.com is the perfect tool for webmasters. I love it!

Hi,

Welcome to my latest review, i'll be talking about website research, competitors and stats. We use search engines everyday that means data's being collected. There are a few places where such data can be found. alexa.com and quantcast.com There both very similar in nature and one would do well to use both respectively. Quantcast has a slightly more cleaner feel about it in saying that alexa have the better layout of the two but thats just me. I have a graphic design background perhaps that offers some insight. Another site I'd like to mention is Googles Doublick now it's by Google so be weary never the less it is relevant and extremely useful they are still number one and i don't see that changing any time soon as far as algorithms and relevancy go in relation to social networks which are based on where you are? Are you alive? Who are your friends? And what are your interests, syndicated networks, i'm talking about Facebook sorry for derailing but heres some food for thought.

"Our bodies are designed with the flaw of wanting to be crackheads. And manipulating that flaw is partly how you get 500 million users"

Anyway add Doubleclick to your research list. Heres there about us statement which i urge all reviewers and consumers to read when ever looking into a site or embarking on a business venture. Also add Googles Insight to the equation another tool of importance but i'll leave that out in this review.

Google's DoubleClick products provide ad management and ad serving solutions to companies that buy, create or sell online advertising. The world's top marketers, publishers, ad networks and agencies use DoubleClick products as the foundation for their online advertising businesses. With deep expertise in ad serving, media planning, search management, rich media, video and mobile, our DoubleClick products help customers execute their digital media strategy more effectively

Having these sites at our disposal and for the most part free gives you the power to monitor, improve with site audits which you pay for, precise research, counter intelligence and much much more. Tracking your competition is important especially for young and up coming sites. The point of this review is, research needs to have an articulate body that in end helps you reach a conclusion and point of direction. I think the tools i've mentioned do that and are primary. Thanks for reading.

Rains