The Wall Street Journal reported last night that Google is close to offering a website ranking service that would compete with Alexa as well as the paid offerings from Comscore and Nielson Online. Google’s service will of course be free and instantly sent shares of ComScore (SCOR) down in late trading. This is particularly interesting since Comscore’s article earlier this year about Google’s decline search traffic (and specifically clicks on search ads) sent Google’s stock down almost 20% over a two week period.

I checked with several industry insiders and the rumors I’m hearing are that this service will be very accurate and fundamentally different from alexa (which ranks your site in a relative scale compared to other sites). I’m even hearing that Google plans to get the data from actual web servers (raw numbers!).

T35 is currently ranking top 5,000 on Alexa:

I wonder how well we would do when Google ranks us? One thing is for sure, this service will definitely give more ammo to the internet marketers of the ‘net.

June 30th Update: The service is officially in beta, and I have been playing around with it all evening. It looks really cool and will probably put a lot of companies out of business.

Here are some screenshots:

It still seems a little buggy, for example T35 Hosting shows up in the “Body Builder” category, and the stats don’t seem close to the actual numbers. Still, once the bugs are fixed and they are out of beta, I think this will become the premier internet marketing tool.