Web of Trust is a community-based surfing tool that uses a peer-based rating system. The rating system is implemented as a browser add-on and the add-on is available in a number of languages for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. When you browse to a website rated poorly, WOT will put up a warning page where you can then decide if you wish to proceed or not.

When registered WOT users browse to various websites they have the ability of rating that website based on trust, reliability, privacy and child safety. The rating is a sliding color scale from red (bad) to green (good) with various colors between.

Ideally, ratings reflect the true nature of the website being rated. Practically, however, they sometimes do not and this can lead to some mis-information. Note: Overall WOT is a good thing with mostly good ratings. The ratings can, however, be influenced in a negative direction undeservedly. Various factors enter into play here. Among them can be...

1. Users will often not bother to rate a website if they think it is good. They visit a site and get busy doing what they are doing at the site and just ignore the WOT rating. This would tend to bias the ratings toward the negative for a site with few ratings. The more ratings there are, the more likely the rating is closer to accurate for any given site but even that is not necessarily sufficient.
2. Vendors like to get any advantage they can. This means that one vendor can go to a competitor's site and give a less than good rating to that site. If that vendor can get enough people to do likewise then this skews the ratings. Of course, the reverse is also true, a vendor can skew ratings to the positive for themselves using similar methods.

WOT says: "WOT tracks each user's rating behavior before deciding how much it trusts the user....You must prove yourself before we take you seriously. The system will ignore all ratings created by a user attempting to manipulate the reputation data." This would be an attempt to guard against the problems above. No matter how sophisticated the algorithm for deciding how much to trust a rater, problems can still arise so the ratings should be taken as a guide and not absolute. Comments are allowed so if there is doubt go to the WOT rating page and read some of them. Note that WOT even provides a method for raters to disagree with the comments so also pay attention to the number at the end of each comment to see how many have disagreed with the rating.

As one example, I'd like to take the site liutilities.com. Please note that in the interest of full disclosure this site provides software advertised on CKnow.com. I've used this software for some time and find it useful. The Windows registry does collect a bunch of junk that should be cleaned out now and again. Registry Booster does this well. Why mention this? Because sales pages on their website are fairly aggressive. They offer a free scan and since the Windows registry collects junk almost daily the scan is going to show various errors. Any registry scanner will give this result. The problem is that people will read "free scan" as meaning "free scan and fix" and that's where the problem comes in. Words mean things and a scan is just that, a scan with NO promise to fix anything. For this reason, WOT users will often give sites like this a bad rating for mis-advertising when, in fact, the problem is not the site but the user not reading the site correctly. If you want to read more about this, please see the CKnow page How Do I Read an Internet Product Page. For now, let's just look at how two rating services look at the liutilities.com site.

Liutilities.com at WOT

Here is the rating at WOT on the day of posting this entry...

Note that it's red for just the reasons above. People mis-read the product page for the most part. As I said, I've personally used the software for some time now and find it both accurate and useful.

Liutilities.com at McAfee Site Advisor

The McAfee Site Advisor site is a professionally-run site with ratings based on actual examination of websites by trained staff members. User ratings are taken into account but each rated site is examined in detail, even to the point of downloading and testing any software offered by the site. Look at the difference in their rating...

Note that it's green and that all software on the site tests malware-free. While they are below the capture point, all the links on the site also point to green sites. In short, a completely opposite result from the WOT rating.

Bottom Line

Rating sites like WOT can be helpful but they can be misleading if followed blindly. Sometimes it's good to get a second opinion.