I have to object with Arrington’s analysis of Alexa and scold him for yet another blog article about how Alexa is inaccurate and needs a “re-work”.

Alexa is just a tool, no more no less. We all know HOW Alexa gathers data, and we all know the flaws. It should be used along with Compete and Comscore to gain an overall picture of where a website ranks in comparison to other sites in it’s field. Just like your FICO score is calculated from 3 credit reporting agencies, your overall website rank is the summation of different traffic and influence measurements.

I can find flaws in any web service. How easy it is to show a bad rank order in Google? How easy is it to spot inaccuracies with the Technorati Top 100? Singling out tools and highlighting how inaccurate they are when you fully understand how it collects data is foolish. It also means that you can’t discount a tool completely just because it isn’t perfect. Will I post a blog article about how Google is useless because it could give me a good result set for “car insurance”? Of course not, I’ll just use another tool in my virtual “tool belt”.

Posting’s like this one are useless and contribute nothing to the discussion. Have I learned anything besides TC pointing out that more Alexa users visit YouTube than Google? No, I could have gone to Alexa and seen for myself. The content of this posting is just blogosphere flame bait spewed out by anyone who wants to make a name for themselves or attract the largest crowd (in this case the latter).