Amazon's Alexa to retire What's Hot trending feature

Amazon's Alexa is to shut down its What's Hot feature at the end of this year, the company has confirmed. The company has been removing data sources to the trending aggregator in the run-up to its eventual removal.

In the last few months, a number of Vietnamese search terms have been appearing on the What's Hot list - though this may be partly explained by an increase in business interest in Vietnam, it is however largely to do with the feature losing data sources.

Alexa told IBTimes UK: "The What's Hot feature will be shut down around the end of this year.

"The plan to shut that down has no impact on the rest of our service, including the Web Analytics which will continue."

Alexa rankings are considered an important indication of the popularity of a website, though the trending feature is losing data sources, none are being removed from other analytics services.

"Our panel data comes from a variety of sources which helps to remove any bias that might be introduced by using a single source where that typical audience has a common set of shared behaviours," Alexa added.

"None of those data sources have been removed from the service as a whole. It's simply the What's Hot feature that has had some data sources removed."

Amazon has a history of quietly retiring features and products. Earlier in 2015, the company suddenly shut down Amazon Destinations, a travel booking site, without much explanation.

Alexa was founded in 1996 and bought by Amazon in 1999. The company's analytics once relied wholly on the data from the Alexa toolbar but in 2008 the company decided to bring in more data sources.