Laymans help on 'Alexa Wayback'. Is the list provided for www.
addresses specific to a computer, person or ?? It gives lists for
sites I've never visited and on dates when I was out of the country.
How does it work?

Hi there!

It sounds like Alexa's toolbar is giving you fits.  Don't worry, your
computer hasn't been commandeered while you've been away!

Alexa gives a "quicktour" about its toolbar service here:

[ http://www.alexa.com/prod_serv/quicktour.html ]

There are three sections of the toolbar that will provide lists.  I'm
going to address all of them for you.

The Related Links button will provide you with a list of pages
*similar* to the one you're looking at when you press the button.  You
need not ever have visited the pages listed for them to appear in that
list. Alexa gathers information from the browsers of everyone who uses
their service, reading both the page they came from and the page they
are going to upon exiting the page in question.

For example:  You're looking for good chocolate, so you visit
Ghirardelli's website.  You decide that you like what you see, and
would like more information about other good chocolate makers, and
click the Related Links button.  It pops up a list of pages that
you've never seen before!  This can be confusing, as the list does
look very similar to a "Browser History" list.  It isn't, though. 
It's a list of pages that *other Alexa users* visited either before or
after they visited the Ghirardelli page.

Here's how Alexa explains it:

"Related Links

Whenever an Alexa user visits a web page, the Alexa service retrieves
information from the Alexa servers to suggest other pages that might
be of interest to the user. To find Related Links, we use several
techniques, including:

    * The usage paths of the collective Alexa community- this is the
most important source of our information, since these paths show us
which web sites our users believe are important and interesting.
    * Clustering - the hundreds of millions of links on the Web can be
used to find clusters of sites that are similar and relevant to one
another. We mine this data by using custom databases to find and
identify these clusters.
    * Users' suggestions - we consider our users' suggestions to
augment our Related Links recommendations."

Alexa Websearch Technology
[ http://www.alexa.com/company/technology.html ]

This is also how the Alexa Search function works.  If you look up a
web page, then click on a link, Alexa will provide a list of sites
similar to the page you're heading for, on the chance that they might
also be of interest to you.  These aren't sites you've been to,
they're sites other people have been to.

The Wayback button is something different entirely.  When you're
viewing a page and click the Wayback button, Alexa will take you to a
list of links that show how that particular page looked on a certain
date.  It is not a listing of when you personally have visted that
page.

Using Ghirardelli again as an example (no, I don't like Ghirardelli
chocolates!  Why do you ask? ;) ), let's say you're looking at the
current Ghirardelli page.  You click the Wayback Button, and it brings
up this page:

[ http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ghirardelli.com ]

The top of the page says "Search Results for Jan 01, 1996 - May 18,
2002".  That's the range from the earliest date of the Internet
Archive until today.  Below is a table, divided by years, showing
lists of dates.

Those dates are not dates for the last time you visited the page, or
even the last time anyone at all visited the page.  They are the dates
for each time Alexa's archive bot has crawled the page to copy it.  A
star next to a date indicates that the page had changed significantly
since the last time the bot had a wander through.

Alexa explains that here:

"When our automated systems crawl the web every few months or so, we
find that only about 50% of all pages on the web have changed from our
previous visit. This means that much of the content in our archive is
duplicate material. If you don't see "*" next to an archived document,
then the content on the archived page is identical to the previously
archived copy."

FAQs About the Wayback Machine - "What does it mean when a site's
archive data has been "updated"?"
[ http://www.archive.org/about/faq-wayback.html ]

(A bot, incidentally, is a little program that follows specific
instructions.  Briefly explained, Alexa's archive bot is a program
that has been instructed to copy web pages each time it visits them,
and send the copies back to Alexa's server.

Brewster Kahle, of the Internet Archive, and Richard Koman discuss the
bots here:

"Koman: What are the crawlers written in?

Kahle: Combinations of C and Perl. Almost everything we can, we do in
Perl -- for ease of portability, maintability, flexibility. Because
there's so much horsepower we don't really require a tight system. The
crawlers record pages into 100MB files in a standard archive file
format, and then store it on one of the storage machines.[...]."

How the Wayback Machine Works
[ http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/webservices/2002/01/18/brewster.html
])

Even though Alexa *is* paying attention to the sites you visit,
they're not keeping a specific "List of Sites and Dates for
muncieborder-ga".  They're just making note of which pages their users
visit, then feeding the information to a database to give their users
more options in their searching.

I hope this clears things up for you!

Happy surfing!

missy-ga

Concise and accurate answer. The clarification is extremely useful. Thank you!
jfb