The Alexa What’s Hot feature was just officially turned off today. If you now go to www.alexa.com/whatshot you’ll be redirected to a support article on the site:
The What’s Hot feature has been retired – February 2016
The Alexa What’s Hot feature was retired in February 2016.
You can uninstall the optional buttons from your Internet Explorer toolbar at any time via the toolbar options menu.
Back in 2009 I wrote a popular post about the Alexa Hot URLs feature, which was eventually renamed to Alexa What’s Hot. I suspect that it took some processing power in order to determine and update the most-trafficked URLs on the web every 5 minutes. And since I’m probably the only one who actually used the feature on a regular basis, that’s why they retired it.
Honestly, even though the Alexa What’s Hot / Alexa Hot URLs feature was so easily manipulated, there were actual decent news articles and various other URLs that made it into there naturally that it was worth watching on a regular basis.
I have to say, I’m going to miss it.