Alexa Toolbar

Download Alexa Toolbar

Alexa Toolbar and Features

What is the Alexa toolbar?

The Alexa toolbar is a browser plug-in. That is, a small piece of code which installs itself on your computer's browser. Your browser is what you use to surf the net, usually Internet Explorer.

Who writes the code and what is it all about?

The code is written by the computer wiz's at Alexa, which is an Amazon company. Although there are lots of features, essentially the idea behind the toolbar is to give your browser more functionality by allowing you to search Google at any time just by typing your search query into the toolbar. It also allows you to find related links to the site you are visiting, or even just to block pop-up ads.

Why do I need the toolbar?

You don't need the toolbar to surf the internet just the same as you don't need a word processor to type a letter. You could type it with notepad. However the word processor gives you much more functionality and many more features than a basic text editor. The toolbar is a bit like that: more functions and more features.

Even faster surfing since you don't have to log on to Google itself to search for something. You can even jump straight to related sites from the one you are visiting simply by using the drop-down menu on the toolbar.

Ok, I'm interested, tell me more

Let's begin with Google. It is arguably, the best search engine available and has been for a number of years. Lots of other search engines rely on Google to provide some, if not all, of their search result data, including AOL, Yahoo, Teoma and Ask Jeeves.

Google has a database of over 4 billion web pages! Imagine being able to have 'one-click' access to over 4 billion pages of information directly from your own browser.

Now you are beginning to understand what I mean when I say the toolbar increases your browser's functionality!

And that's just the beginning! Let's say you visited a website and wanted to let a friend know because it had some important information you thought your friend would be interested in. What are your options? Limited really. You would have to log on to your email, cut and paste the url from your browser's address bar, and send an email to your friend with a cover note. What if you could just click a button, choose the email address to send it to and that's it? With the toolbar, you can! 'Tell a friend' is just one of the toolbar features.

I've heard enough! I want to download the Alexa toolbar now!

I would like to hear more

Although you probably aren't aware of it, websites are also ranked by Alexa. This means that if you visit a website you have located with your Alexa toolbar, there is a very good chance it will be a quality website with highly relevant, high quality information.

Not only that, but you have the ability to get information on the website itself, such as how popular the site is or what ranking it has with Alexa. The higher the website ranks, the more likely it is that it is a quality site.

Another thing you probably aren't aware of is something called 'Internet Archiving'. This is literally, an archive of the internet, stretching back years and indexed using similar technologies to that of the search engines.

Have you ever wondered what a website used to look like? Another feature of the toolbar is the ability to access the Internet Archive directly from your browser!