Can Someone fill me in on Starware.com?

I´m always interested when I come across a website that seems to be anomalous. yesterday, doing a little brainstorming for a client, I was on ranking.com, reviewing their list of top sites.

I was perusing the list, the usual suspects, Google, MSN, AOL and so on, and my eye stopped at number 8. starware. I thought to myself, "I´ve never heard of this website," and wondered what kind of a service they must be offering, then I glaned over to the links in, thinking it must be a social networking site with tons of inbound links - something that has acheived success through grass-roots marketing.

But the site has SIGNIFICANTLY fewer inbound links that all of the other sites on the page.

AOL in the number 7 spot reports over 53 million links.

ebay, in the number 9 spot, over 5 million.

starware.com? just over 70 thousand.

So next, I link over to the site, to see if I can find some clue there. OK, it´s a search engine. Must be a brand owned by one of the Internet Behemoths. So, I read a little more on their site, and look at Alexa.com to see how they are ranked (205, with only 115 links in - still pretty impressive, though not top 10).

Next I start thinking about the differences in the reporting from Alexa and Ranking.com. I can think of a couple of possible explainations.

1. ranking.com and starware are affiliated in some way and users of the ranking.com and starware.com toolbars are integrated somehow.

2. starware.com is particularly popular among people who have downloaded the ranking.com toolbar. these are people who are more inclined to download toolbars, newer on the ´Net than alexa users, who are perhaps, more the old guard?

Finally I had a look at the traffic history on Alexa.com. These guys have been around a few years. traffic starts to grow in 2004, ramps up dramatically in ´06, and then roughly doubles over ´07.

I need to close here by saying I'm in Buenos Aires, and so there are also lots of major movie releases, hot new tv shows and stuff that I totally miss down here. Can somebody fill me in?

Thanks.

Lu