14 DAY TRIAL // Recently, WOT (Web of Trust), a crowdsourced website reputation service, has been updated to a new version that promises increased visibility in user ratings.
Its purpose is to provide users with ratings for the sites they visit in order to prevent them from landing in the dark corners of the Internet. Website reputation is offered for search results, too, from Google, Yahoo!, Bing or any other search engine.
The information about a website is available in the form of a traffic light icon displayed at the end of the link. WOT can be downloaded as a browser extension, for all major browsers: Google Chrome, Firefox (requires browser restart), Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.
Immediately after installing the extension, you can choose one of the three protection profiles available: basic – with ratings display in a pop-up window, light – no pop-ups, parental control – blocks access to pages with a low reputation score for children.
In most cases, WOT is visible as a traffic light icon in the browser interface, generally next to the address bar, which colors differently, according to the reputation of the website you’re on. In Internet Explorer, the add-on is located under the address bar, chipping at the screen real estate.
In the case of Google Chrome, there is a web app available in the store, called WOT Safe Search, whose purpose is to run an “optimized” search through WOT’s own service.
The only controls you have are for making the search safer and exclude sites that have been labeled as unsuitable for children and those with a poor reputation. Results are different from what Google lists, though, and contain sponsored links.
An extension is also available for Chrome; it features the same functionality and behavior as in Opera browser. In both browsers you get to select the level of protection (normal, light or none) and add parental control filtering as well as enable the reputation icon at all times or just for poor ratings.
As part of advanced settings, you can enable the display of website reputation in a pop-up window.
A similar configuration window is available for Mozilla Firefox, but there is slightly more flexibility available. One of the differences is that in the case of the normal level of protection you can select between the display of a warning pop-up only and blocking access to pages with poor reputation.
The advanced options in Firefox are also richer. In Mozilla’s browser, the extension offers the possibility to re-pin the button if it gets removed and to disable the extension when browsing in Private mode.
Options present in Opera, Chrome and Firefox are enabling cookies to automatically log into your WOT account and viewing reputation details in a pop-up window in search results.
WOT relies on two components to calculate the warning for each page: trustworthiness and child safety. Each can receive a rating ranging from “very poor” to “excellent.”
The new part in this version of the service is the use of an analysis algorithm for calculating the relevance of an opinion into the reputation of a web page.
Making your opinion count more requires a bit more effort as the developers make available a questionnaire where you can mark the website for privacy risks, as suspicious, online tracking, controversial or as potentially illegal.
WOT uses behind-the-scene analysis to calculate user input into the reputation of a website. Different aspects are considered, such as activity in the community and behavior. Suffice it to say that not all ratings weigh the same and that some of the Bayesian inference principles are used to avoid manipulation of the service.
Not just community input is balanced in; external, trusted sources such as phishing and malware listings are also contributing.
In Internet Explorer, the settings panel for Web of Trust has not been updated to the simplicity available in the one for the other three browsers we tested it on (Chrome, Opera and Firefox. It is not more difficult to handle but there are more panels to go through and the options have not been contracted.
For instance, customizing the level of protection entails choosing the relative rating for trustworthiness and child safety that should trigger a specific behavior (warning or blocking access).
However, I don’t suppose it will be long until the developer rolls out a revised interface that requires less time to get through configuration.
Configuring WOT does not require an account, but by registering you can contribute to the community with your own input (comments). It can be easily done when rating a website.
The reliability of the service has grown in the past years, despite voices accusing it of being exactly the opposite of what it should be, and proof is the collaboration with Facebook, Opera and Mail.ru Group.
At the moment, according to the developer’s real-time count, the number of downloads is getting close to the 95 million mark and there are more than 44 million websites rated by the community.
Markus Suomi, CEO of WOT, said “WOT protects users from online threats such as scams, spam and rogue online stores that are encountered within social networking sites, when shopping online or navigating the Net. The *Instagram scam was an excellent example of the kinds of threats users experience in social networks.”
*The developer reported that said Instagram scam was spotted on Facebook and consisted in offering a PC version of the application. The fraud was identified through WOT and a poor rating was assigned for the website, thus warning other users in the community of the scam.
The Good
Configuration is flexible and offers the possibility to regulate the action to be taken when a page meets a specific rating.
The Bad
Low confidence reputation is not marked visibly and the rating of just a few users could be misleading. Also, there are no details on the total number of contributors for a rating.
