Mediaboss Marketing

By Neil J. Rubenking

These days, before trying a new restaurant, movie, or concert venue, you probably check relevant social media sites first, to see what other people are saying about it. The free Web of Trust service aims to give you that same experience as you wander the Web. Web of Trust goes beyond simple vote-counting with an algorithm that incorporates user reputation, and it pulls in data from third-party blacklists as well. You can even use it for a degree of parental control, though it won't replace a dedicated parental control utility.

When I first reviewed Web of Trust over five years ago, it was still relatively new. I reported that its 5 million users had rated over 23 million websites. The service has matured quite a bit, and now has over 130 million users, or at least, over 130 million downloads, and a correspondingly larger reach in terms of rated websites.

Links Rated To start using Web of Trust, just navigate to the company's website. You'll find there's a big button to install the add-on for the browser you're using. Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari are supported, on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. If you use multiple browsers, you'll want to install Web of Trust for each.

The add-on marks up links in popular search engines and social networking sitesnearly three dozen sites all told. You'll find it's active in expected locations like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter, but it also supports international sites including Yandex, Baidu, and Wirtualna Polska Szukaj. Like SiteAdvisor (included in McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2015 and other McAfee products), Web of Trust marks safe links with a green icon and dangerous ones with a red icon. For example, if your friend posts an article on Facebook, and the link might lead somewhere fishy, Web of Trust puts a red icon next to it.Iffy sites get marked yellow, and as-yet-unrated ones get a gray icon with a question mark. You can hover over the icon for more detail, or click for Web of Trust's full analysis page.

There's one important difference between SiteAdvisor and Web of Trust. SiteAdvisor's Web crawlers perform various analyses of websites, noting, among other things, whether the site hosts malware, sends spam to visitors, or links to bad sites. Web of Trust primarily relies on its millions of users to define site reputation, though it does pull in data from some third-party sources, among them SURBL and PhishTank.

The floating detail box conveys a lot of information visually. Two colored rings indicate the site's reputation level for overall trustworthiness and for child safety. A crowd of people-shaped icons serves to give you an idea of how many have rated the site. In addition, you get a summary of reasons for the sites rating, for example, "malware or viruses."

The full detail page lets you know if any third-party data went into the rating, anddisplays any reviews left by users. Other useful data include the site's popularity and ranking, the geolocation of its server, and links to whois information about the site.

Here's an interesting twist. For those with color vision deficiency, Web of Trust can be configured to flag sites using easily-distinguished black-and-white icons. The red-yellow-green sliders on the site rating page change to use colors that are clearly distinct even for those who don't perceive certain color ranges.

Sites Blocking Options By default, Web of Trust always shows site reputation icons for links on supported search and social media sites. You can set it to only show icons for problematic sites, or skip the icons completely.

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Web of Trust