Compete.com

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Compete.com

Type	Private
Founded	2000
Founder	Bill Gross
Headquarters	Boston, MA, United States
Area served	internet
Industry	analytic
Products	Complete Toolbar (free)
Services	Search Analytics aka SnapShot (free), Site Analytics aka Site Referrals (commercial)
Owner	Taylor Nelson Sofres
Website	http://compete.com/
Type of site	web traffic and ranking
Available in	English
Current status	active

Compete is a United States web traffic analysis service that publishes the approximate number of U.S. visitors to top 1,000,000 web sites in the United States. This number is computed from sources including internet service providers, opt-in panels, application providers, and users of the Compete toolbar. Unlike Alexa Internet, the service does not provide information for global Internet traffic.

Launched in 2000 by Bill Gross, an entrepreneur who started the search engine GoTo,^[1] Compete.com has over 2 million members as of 2006.^[2]

[edit] Compete Toolbar

The Compete Toolbar allows users to view the Compete Trust Scores and the U.S. Internet ranks of websites they visit. This is done by sending the URLs that users visit to Compete.com. Compete.com then sends back the trust scores and internet ranks from its database to the users. Additionally, users of the Compete Toolbar have the option of participating in Community Share. By participating in Community Share, users will be assigned a user number and that number will be submitted along with the URLs of the websites that these users visit. This information will be used to roughly determine how many users visit each website. Although no personally identifiable information is submitted to Compete.com,[1] the server receives the originating IP address.