July 18th, 2007

Sparky: New Official Alexa Toolbar for Firefox



The Alexa toolbar has always attracted webmasters to improve the Alexa ranking of their websites. However, the official Alexa toolbar was only available for Internet explorer users. Firefox users were using alternate extensions to increase their Alexa ranks. Now Sparky promises the official alternative for Firefox.

As Alexa celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Alexa Toolbar on July 17, they released the first FireFox compatible toolbar, called Sparky. Some cool features of the toolbar are -
* Related Links: Find sites that are similar to the one you are currently visiting.
* Traffic Trend: A sparkline showing the traffic trend from the last four months.
* Reach Meter: A neat little indicator that shows the site’s Reach.
* Traffic Rank: Shows the current site’s Alexa Traffic Rank.

When you decide to install Sparky (using Firefox), you are made to agree and accept the Alexa Privacy policy statement.

“Alexa’s toolbar service collects and stores information about the web pages you view, the data you enter in online forms and search fields, and, with versions 5.0 and higher, the products you purchase online while using the toolbar service. Although alexa does not attempt to analyze web usage data to determine the identity of any alexa user, some information collected by the toolbar service is personally identifiable. Alexa aggregates and analyzes the information it collects to improve its service and to prepare reports about aggregate web usage and shopping habits”

Alexa collects its data and determines the Alexa rank of websites depending on the usage patterns of Alexa toolbar loaded web browsers. Now with the official Firefox extension, the accuracy of data will improve as the popular Firefox user data will also be compiled.

Since the System Requirements indicate that it requires Firefox 2.0+ to work, its another reason to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox as previous 1.5 versions will not be supported soon.

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Filed under Alexa, Blogging, Firefox


Comments

  • 1. Benedict Herold | 19/07/07  #

    Sparky sound interesting and it would have been great if it was released sometime back. Now I’m more comfortable with SearchStatus extension!

  • 2. QuickOnlineTips | 19/07/07  #

    SearchStatus is not officialy supported by Alexa. If you are looking to increase your Alexa rank, Sparky is the answer for Firefox.

  • 3. Ratnadeep | 6/04/08  #

    I am using the smartPR toolbar.It works fine.So which one is better for firefox?

  • 4. QuickOnlineTips | 7/04/08  #

    I found the smartPR toolbar at
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5150
    They say “usage of this toolbar will increase the Alexa Rank of the websites you visit” and the privacy ploicy also says they transmit data to Alexa.

    I have no personal experience of using this. There are many such toolbars available as add-ons for firefox, but Sparky is the official one supported by Alexa.
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5362



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