This morning, John has a good column up about Alexa - it seems that he has lost faith in their rankings too.

John, at the moment I don't really see a free competitor with consistent data that seems more reliable than Alexa's terrible numbers, but Compete.com seems to be the closest thing to it - although for niche sites it seems more like a second stab in the dark than a viable alternative because of their approach to measuring traffic.

One last Alexa-related note - I was surprised and dismayed that Amazon.com (Alexa's parent company) chose to force Alexaholic to shut down by cutting off their data feeds.  Prior to their shutdown, Alexaholic had what was by far the best user interface for Alexa's charts, and the fact that they forced it to shut down - and still have not adopted any of those interface features - is baffling.