Feature Deprecation Announcement: Alexa Rank and Social Shares/Hotness

As part of a wider product strategy, we've recently made the decision to deprecate some of the older and lesser utilized features in our product stack. Two of those features on the list are Alexa Rank and Social Shares/Hotness. Below you can read about what exactly is happening and the actions you need to take.

If you are not utilizing any of these features, then you don’t need to do anything. If you are, please read the following deprecation guidelines for each of the affected features. You can also read more about our plans on our blog.

1. Alexa Rank Deprecation

What is happening, and why?

Earlier this year Alexa.com announced that they will be shutting down access to their rankings API and from December 15th 2022 the Alexa.com API will be fully deprecated.  As a result, Alexa Ranks in the News API have not been updated since May 1st 2022, however, a snapshot of the Alexa Rank has been used to keep the feature operational. 

Who will this impact?

Customers who are currently:

• Filtering by sources over/under a certain Alexa Rank threshold e.g. source.rankings.alexa.rank.min

• Sorting by Alexa Rank e.g. sort_by : source.rankings.alexa
• Leveraging Alexa Rank in post processing

What are we doing about it?

As an interim measure, AYLIEN has taken a snapshot of Alexa Ranks from May 1st 2022, meaning that you will be able to continue to use source.rankings.alexa for filtering and sorting in the News API. However, rankings will not be updated on a regular basis, as they previously were, and no new sources that are added to the News API source list will have corresponding rankings.

In the meantime, we are actively looking for a viable alternative. Once this process is completed, and a replacement to Alexa.com as a ranking data source is fully implemented into the News API, we will be deprecating the snapshot functionality. We will notify all customers with further information on the replacement and full instructions on necessary actions as soon as a decision is made. 

What do you have to do now?

If you wish to continue to use the snapshot of Alexa Rank, the good news is you do not have to change anything at the moment. But please bear in mind that this feature will eventually be deprecated and replaced with an alternative ranking feature.

Once an alternative for source ranking has been identified, the Alexa rankings enrichment will be removed from all data available from the API. This means you will not be able to use it as a query input and it will not be included as an enrichment in the data payload.

How does this affect historic data?

Once this feature is eventually deprecated, it will no longer appear in newly indexed data and it will be removed from historic data. This means users will not be able to use it as a query input and it will not be included as an enrichment in the data payload. 

2. Social Shares and Hotness Deprecation

What is happening, and why?

AYLIEN is deprecating the Social Shares feature from the News API, and as a byproduct sorting by Hotness will no longer be functional. 

Since September 2020 AYLIEN has only supported Reddit for the Social Shares feature, as the cost of accessing other social media platforms’ social share data became prohibitive and unrealistic. Only 0.8% on average of news articles are linked to Reddit shares daily, so we have decided to deprecate this feature. 

There is currently no intention to replace or find an alternative for this feature.

Who will this impact?

Customers who are: 

• Leveraging social shares as a filter e.g. social_shares_count.reddit.min
• Leveraging social shares as a sort e.g. sort_by: social_shares_count or sort_by: social_shares_count.reddit or sort_by: "hotness" (the “hotness” metric synthesizes social shares and recency)
• Leveraging social shares in post-processing 

When is this happening?

Deprecation of Social Shares will take place 30 days from now, on October 31st 2022. 

What do you need to do? 

If you are currently using Social Shares you should remove it from your queries or post-processing to avoid any issues caused by the deprecation. 

In the absence of Social Shares, sorting by Hotness will no longer be possible, as Hotness is a combination of Social Shares and Recency. For a similar result, we advise you to change to sorting by Recency. In fact, due to the rarity of Reddit shares, Hotness has been for the vast majority of cases solely based on Recency. 

Another alternative is if you are searching for entities, you can sort the response by order of Entity Prominence. Entity Prominence is a measure of how significant a mention of an entity is. Sorting by prominence therefore will return the articles with the most significant mentions of entities you are searching for in descending order of significant mentions.

How does this affect historic data?

Once Social Shares is deprecated, it will no longer appear in newly indexed data and it will be removed from historic data. This means users will not be able to use it as a query input and it will not be included as an enrichment in the data payload. 

In the meantime, if you have any questions about either of these feature deprecations, please don’t hesitate to respond to customer support: customer.support@aylien.com.