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How Google Can Kill Alexa in One Simple Step

Alexa drives me nuts. The fact that their stats are skewed, gamed, and untrustworthy makes them unusable, but often they are the only recourse to add any sort of quantitative analysis to a post. So - it would be great to have a real alternative, and Google has the data, the sharing infrastructure, and the non-evil political will to do so.

Adding a “Sharing” option to Google Analytics and surfacing stats in “site:” searches (for those site owners who have elected the sharing option in their Analytics account) would do the job nicely. Let site owners control the degree of information shared, keep everything opt-in, and rock and roll. I know I’d share my high-level views & visits stats in a second. In addition to providing all of the value Alexa does, it would also add a layer of transparency to making ad-buys - something else I would appreciate.

Here are some ideas on implementation - click each to view the full screenshot.

Of course not everyone would share their stats, and not everyone uses Google Analytics, so I suppose Alexa would persist - but at least it would plant the meme out there that other alternatives can exist, beyond crappy (Alexa) and expensive (hitwise).

alexa, google, hitwise stats

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