There are several free online services offering you information about the safety of the website about to be visited by you. I’ve written about some of these services earlier: McAfee Site Advisor and Google Safe Browsing. These services depend mainly upon various algorithms to check the safety and security of a website. On the other hand, WOT (Web of Trust) is a free browser add-on or extension that informs you about the safety of visiting a website based upon the user ratings, i.e., on the basis of the experience of other users.
WOT is available as an add-on for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. Recently, a WOT browser extension has been made available for Google Chrome also.
WOT warns you about risky websites that are security threats, or that cheat customers, deliver malware or send spam. Its ratings for websites are based upon the ratings given by millions of Internet users who are members of the WOT community. These users rate websites based on their own browsing experience. Thus, you get to know what other users have experienced about a particular website. While you can form your own opinion about a website, knowing what the experience of a large number of other users has been in respect of a particular website can help you to understand the risk involved in visiting a website.
For example, at the time of this writing, WOT add-on for Firefox has been downloaded by more than 7 million users, and more than 25 million websites have been rated by these users. These ratings are continuously updated by the users.
The ratings are given on four factors: trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety.
WOT add-on provides the reputation ratings to the websites listed in the search results when you use Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Wikipedia and other popular sites, helping you protect your computer and personal information (see image below):
You can also check the reputation of a website with WOT by using the following URL:
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/www.example.com
where, you’ve to replace “www.example.com” with the address of the desired website. For example, the reputation of Wikipedia as per WOT is displayed in the following image (click on the image to enlarged it):
You may try WOT add-on, and may be, you can use it along with other free online services advising about the safety of websites being visited by you. This may help you to form a balanced opinion.
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