Alexa.com, an Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) subsidiary company, has released a new toolbar. What is Alexa? Alexa is best known for collecting data from Alexa toolbars and then assigning traffic rankings based on how many people with Alexa toolbars visit the websites that are indexed on the Alexa database.

Alexa features a Top 500 and Movers & Shakers section on their website as well. Movers & Shakers indicates which websites in the Top 100,000 has dropped or grown substantially in rankings. The top 3 websites in Alexa are search engine giants Yahoo!, MSN, and Google. Yahoo! has been remaining #1 for years now whereas MSN.com and Google.com are fighting on and off for #2.

Alexa rankings have such a profound effect on how much credibility a website has because many venture capitalists determine whether to give funding to certain website businesses based on their rankings. It has been a long time since Alexa has released a new toolbar, but now I will highlight the features of the new toolbar:

One of the most notable differences is that there is an arrow next to the ranking indicating whether websites has grown or fallen in rankings. A green up arrow means that the site ranking has gone up and a red arrow pointing down means that the ranking has fallen. Another difference is that the toolbar also shows users what rank a website has grown from or has fallen from directly on the toolbar so users don’t necessarily have to visit the website to find out.

The other features that are currently on the new toolbar are the same as the last version such as the pop-up blocker, the website search button, the info pull-down menu, and the pull-down menu for seeing who owns the website that you are visiting, but the new design is a lot more sleek. Currently the Alexa toolbar is not available for Firefox.

Alexa Internet is based in San Francisco, CA. Alexa Internet was started in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. Etoile Investments had backed Alexa with funding at the time. Alexa Internet was a commercial offshoot for Internet Archive, a website that stores the history of a website’s design even before the 2000s. In 1999, Amazon acquired Alexa for $250 million in Amazon stock.

There are a couple websites that we have reviewed in the past that has used the Alexa ranking system to create Web 2.0 applications. The fastest growing application is [Alexaholic]. Another web application that uses Alexa rankings mocks the stock market by allowing users to buy and sell website shares for free which is called [Alexa Street].