Is there a way to check if a browser has the Alexa toolbar installed?

Question

Is there a way to check if a browser of a visitor has the Alexa toolbar installed? This might probably be done via JavaScript.

Doing this would give us the possibility to somewhat compensate for the bias of the Alexa rating of a site. See e.g. Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design

Especially outside of the USA the Alexa toolbar is not too common - but anyway, it is used. So by measuring the ratio of toobar/no-toolbar visits on known websites, one might determine a correction factor.

I'm a web developer/designer with control of a couple of customer websites which I manage. They fall into different categories which, as I can see form the stats, correlate with the use of browsers and platforms, and probably will correlate with the use of the Alexa toolbar too. Those categories might be ‘general public websites’, ‘academic websites’, ‘technical websites’, ‘web developer’s and SEO’s websites’, etc.

I’m not sure if Alexa tries to compensate for this bias itself, and if, how this is done, but perhaps it’s possible to find this information too.

Erich

Answer 1

I found this article that appears to allow you to detect it, tough as pointed out, it is basically spyware, so I don't know why you would go out of your way to "impove" it's view of you: Alex Toolbar Detection