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Is there a way to check if a browser of a visitor has the Alexa toolbar installed? This might probably be done via JavaScript.

Doing this would give us the possibility to somewhat compensate for the bias of the Alexa rating of a site. See e.g. Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design

Especially outside of the USA the Alexa toolbar is not too common - but anyway, it is used. So by measuring the ratio of toobar/no-toolbar visits on known websites, one might determine a correction factor.

I'm a web developer/designer with control of a couple of customer websites which I manage. They fall into different categories which, as I can see form the stats, correlate with the use of browsers and platforms, and probably will correlate with the use of the Alexa toolbar too. Those categories might be ‘general public websites’, ‘academic websites’, ‘technical websites’, ‘web developer’s and SEO’s websites’, etc.

I’m not sure if Alexa tries to compensate for this bias itself, and if, how this is done, but perhaps it’s possible to find this information too.

Erich

esc1729
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  • IMHO, this Alexa toolbar is just another useless tool for the followers of this SEO religion that's been infecting bloggers and web devs/designers. Why would you care what rank a page has? You should instead care if the page was what you were looking for or not. Because this bias even exists in the first place, the tool is inherently flawed, and isn't worth fixing. – Sneakyness Jul 26 '09 at 09:52
  • I do professional web developent/design. My customers care for visibility in the search engines even those who do not do ebusiness but conventional offline business ask about the visibility of their competitors. This is just another web-metrics however its quite biased. I don't want to fix Alexa, I want to understand the bias. – esc1729 Jul 26 '09 at 12:11

2 Answers2

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For some browsers it modifies User Agent so you can check if user is reporting to Alexa using

<?php if (preg_match('/(Alexa)/i',$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {echo 'This is Alexa Reporter :)';) ?>

or

<script>if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Alexa') != -1) {alert('This is Alexa Reporter');}</script>
luchaninov
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I found this article that appears to allow you to detect it, tough as pointed out, it is basically spyware, so I don't know why you would go out of your way to "impove" it's view of you: Alex Toolbar Detection

Kitson
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  • Thank you for the link. I do not use the Alexa toolbar and do not recommend its use to others. I consider it as some mild form of spyware myself (data mining spyware). But I sometimes use the data provided by Alexa (the company), especially when comparing sites worldwide or country wide. I just wanted to understand the bias. – esc1729 Jul 27 '09 at 06:53