Alexa, the white elephant metric site that everybody loves to hate, announced today that they would be making a change to the way that their metrics are compiled.

We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

You gave us many other suggestions as well, and we are working hard to implement them. We won’t tell any secrets just yet, but you can expect to see new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months.

At the moment, you can only see 9 months of historical data with more on the way.
I went over and played with it a little and it almost seems to be off more than it was before. Or maybe the original numbers were really that far off? One thing I did notice though was that many of the sites that I compared that were similar also had similar trend lines. Is it possible that there’s a metric that they are using that could be causing an evening out of the numbers? Even to the point that it causes similar bumps and valleys in all related sites?
It’s obvious that they need to do some more tweaking, and no metric system is perfect, but it’s a step in a well intentioned direction.