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| design:website_classification [2026/08/27 13:44] – Point VirusTotal API/oracle at security:virustotal; contact-form academic subject. Authored by Claude karel.kubicek.claude | design:website_classification [2026/08/27 14:39] (current) – CrUX licence: Tranco homepage CC BY-SA 4.0, methodology silent, Google CC BY 4.0. Authored by Claude karel.kubicek.claude |
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| === Alexa === | === Alexa === |
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| Amazon retired **Alexa.com on 1 May 2022**, per its own end-of-service notice ("we will be retiring Alexa.com on May 1, 2022").((Captured on the alexa.com login page, https://web.archive.org/web/20220315000000/https://www.alexa.com/ — retrieved 2026-08-07. [[Design:Website Selection]] currently gives 1 August 2023; we could not find a primary source for that date, and ''alexa.com'' now redirects to the unrelated Amazon Alexa voice assistant.)) Its ranking service and its category service died together. | Amazon retired **Alexa.com on 1 May 2022**, per its own end-of-service notice ("we will be retiring Alexa.com on May 1, 2022").((Captured on the alexa.com login page, https://web.archive.org/web/20220315000000/https://www.alexa.com/ — retrieved 2026-08-07. An earlier revision of [[Design:Website Selection]] gave 1 August 2023; that date is when Tranco dropped Alexa from the default list, not when Amazon switched the service off. The selection page now carries both dates. ''alexa.com'' redirects to the unrelated Amazon Alexa voice assistant.)) Its ranking service and its category service died together. |
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| * **Why it still matters**: it appears in 12 of the 330 corpus papers that categorise websites, under eight different spellings, and papers published as late as 2024 still use it because their data collection predates the shutdown. If you are reading such a paper, the labels are from a dead service with a documented 0.53% coverage rate. | * **Why it still matters**: it appears in 12 of the 330 corpus papers that categorise websites, under eight different spellings, and papers published as late as 2024 still use it because their data collection predates the shutdown. If you are reading such a paper, the labels are from a dead service with a documented 0.53% coverage rate. |
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| * **The TLD.** Precise where it exists and absent where it matters — a ccTLD is strong evidence, but generic TLDs carry no country at all, and that is most of the head of any list. | * **The TLD.** Precise where it exists and absent where it matters — a ccTLD is strong evidence, but generic TLDs carry no country at all, and that is most of the head of any list. |
| * **CrUX country lists, via Tranco.** Tranco's list-generation API takes ''filterCRUX'', ''filterCRUXType'' (''global'' / ''country'' / ''region'' / ''subregion''), ''filterCRUXValue'' (e.g. a list of country codes) and ''filterCRUXMonth'', so you can generate a country-restricted list reproducibly, with a permalink, from a free account.((https://tranco-list.eu/api_documentation — fetched 2026-08-07. Basic Auth with your email as username and API token as password; the ''/configure'' page returns 401 without a login. CrUX itself is CC BY-SA 4.0.)) This is the cleanest free source and it is under-used. **But it ranks by page loads from Chrome users in a country, which is popularity, not audience** — and the overlap is severe: the union of five country top-10k lists (China, Germany, Italy, Korea, Turkey) is only 18,718 domains rather than 50,000, with 4,017 domains common to all five, and a preliminary labelling built from these lists is incompatible with the site's own TLD in at least 25% of cases for every label {[bozzolan2026_llmweb]}. | * **CrUX country lists, via Tranco.** Tranco's list-generation API takes ''filterCRUX'', ''filterCRUXType'' (''global'' / ''country'' / ''region'' / ''subregion''), ''filterCRUXValue'' (e.g. a list of country codes) and ''filterCRUXMonth'', so you can generate a country-restricted list reproducibly, with a permalink, from a free account.((https://tranco-list.eu/api_documentation — fetched 2026-08-07. Basic Auth with your email as username and API token as password; the ''/configure'' page returns 401 without a login. CrUX datasets are CC BY 4.0 per Google's methodology, fetched 2026-08-27; Tranco's homepage still labels CrUX CC BY-SA 4.0, while the methodology page states no CrUX licence.)) This is the cleanest free source and it is under-used. **But it ranks by page loads from Chrome users in a country, which is popularity, not audience** — and the overlap is severe: the union of five country top-10k lists (China, Germany, Italy, Korea, Turkey) is only 18,718 domains rather than 50,000, with 4,017 domains common to all five, and a preliminary labelling built from these lists is incompatible with the site's own TLD in at least 25% of cases for every label {[bozzolan2026_llmweb]}. |
| * **Site language.** A good proxy, and cheap, but it splits badly on English, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese, which is a large share of the web. | * **Site language.** A good proxy, and cheap, but it splits badly on English, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese, which is a large share of the web. |
| * **Host IP or CDN location.** Measures where bytes are served from. Behind a CDN — most of the head of any list — it tells you about the CDN. See [[Design:IP Classification]] and [[Design:Crawling Location]]. | * **Host IP or CDN location.** Measures where bytes are served from. Behind a CDN — most of the head of any list — it tells you about the CDN. See [[Design:IP Classification]] and [[Design:Crawling Location]]. |
