SiteAdvisor started out as a really good idea. Whenever you went to a site, the SiteAdvisor label would turn green (safe), yellow (shady) or red (dangerous) to indicate the safety of that site. But then McAfee got involved and bundled SiteAdvisor with a search bar, a resident Windows service and other common signs of bloatware. Fortunately, the Web of Trust (WOT) extension stepped up to fill the gap that SiteAdvisor left.
Setup
When installing Web of Trust for the first time, the extension asks you how it should behave. Depending on your needs, you can go with the full package (Basic), a less intrusive version (Light) or a child-safe version. The latter will first check whether or not the site your kid wants to navigate to is safe. If no ratings are available, the site will be blocked. Interestingly, an accessibility setting for color blind people is also available. After choosing which version you want to go with, WOT will prompt you to create an account with them to unlock the full potential of the extension.
How it works
After installing WOT, a color indicator will be placed in the navigation toolbar. Much like SiteAdvisor, a quick glance at this icon lets you know whether you’re safe or not. Additionally, you can click the indicator to reveal more information about the site. WOT keeps track of trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. It is also possible to read user reviews by clicking ‘View scorecard for rating details’.
WOT also protects you when you’re searching with Google, Yahoo and Bing. Depending on your settings, you can choose to have WOT always display a rating next to every search result, only display the rating if it’s not green or not display ratings at all. Similarly, if you’re a Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo Mail user, WOT will display these icons in your incoming e-mails too.
Blocking features
Depending on how cautious you are, you might want to set up WOT like a passive advisor or rather like a mom who is always on your side to keep you out of bad neighborhoods. Either way, you can pull up the settings panel and configure the lowest permissible safety level for each category. Depending on your choice, WOT will either alert you or block you from visiting sites that do not meet your customized safety criteria.
Ryan,
I do not share your view of WOT. I quit using SiteAdvisor when McAfee admitted to re-evaluation delays of three-quarters of a year: bloat I can deal with, but that’s too great a delay for a ’safety’ evaluatrion. I then tried WOT, although their information page didn’t really provide much information.
I don’t know what WOT’s [re-]evaluation period is supposed to be, but I do know that many of the sites I trust, commercial sites, have a red indicator. WOT seems to have a singular antipathy toward Web marketers, in particular, and nowhere on the site, last time I visited it, could I find any means to challenge WOT’s rating. Nor, in fact, could I find any explanation of how that rating is created. (Mind you, I am not directly involved in the information marketing arena, but I do check Web sites/presentations/sales letters for ideas … some of the Web design is quite innovative.)
Each of the four areas judged by WOT can be highly subjective w/o some published standard of judgment and an established route to challenge such judgment. What are those standards? And who does the judging? Who is responsible – and accountable – for these safety labels? What is the process for challenge/adjudication?
Until such information is readily available – and I do mean readily: I should not have to hunt to find it – and until the easily perceived bias against small Web info-marketing sites is adjusted/justified, WOT will continue to stand for Whim of Trust in my book, and will have no place in my systems.
Before I can believe in a Web of Trust, I need to know in whom I’m placing that trust. Don’t you?
It was not Ryan who wrote this article. I did. It was accidentally published under Ryan’s name, but that has been sorted out now.
To answer your question: site ratings are, much like in SiteAdvisor, based on user reviews. Each user has a certain level of trust assigned to him/her to prevent people from gaming the system, so not every review is equal. Additionally, WOT pulls data from some external sources such as SpamCop and hpHosts.
To see how a rating is composed, you might wanna take a look at an example over at [mywot.com] and scroll to the bottom of the page. There, you’ll find both user reviews and computer-driven reviews from the external sources I mentioned earlier.
Also, you might wanna read through WOT’s FAQ if you have further questions about their ranking algorithm.