RSS Feeds from Alexa

Alexa (an Amazon subsidiary) now provides a number of RSS feeds on this page.

However, I don’t quite understand what the intent is behind these feeds. When see a feed with a provocative name like “Hot Search Terms”, I expect the feed to contain, literally, a list of such terms. This is not the case here. The first and only entry in the feed contains a pointer to an HTML page on Alexa; this page contains the list of terms. I would have similar expectations from a feed which purported to contain the top 500 English-language sites.

RSS is typically used to represent dynamic information, and these feeds don’t fit the bill just yet.

I do work with the folks at Alexa from time to time, so I’m sure I’ll hear more about this when I get to work.