Web Of Trust, a.k.a WOT, has been around for quite some years now. WOT installs as a plugin for your browser (Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari) and also as a bookmarklet if your browser isn’t supported. WOT is a website review and reputation service. Sounds familiar? This is a little different from all other similar services offered. Different in the sense that WOT uses crowd-sourcing to form a community of rating individuals who are no different than you and me. This in turn means that not only the websites can be rated faster, but their rating could be based more on opinion(s) rather than objective fact(s). While WOT’s primary source for knowledge is in the form of the ratings from it’s users, it also takes the advantage of certain trusted sources, such as listings of phishing websites from PhishTank. This helps WOT towards a fast, reliable, and automated means of protecting the users from these new, rapidly spreading online threats.

Install WOT

You can head over to WOT homepage to download the plugin. When you open the link, you’ll automatically be presented with the download link of the plugin for your browser (such as Chrome). Just click on the download button and it installs on your browser. That’s it, clean and simple. No initial setup or sign up required.

Having said that, I recommend you to register. By doing that, you can customize the security level accordingly, post your questions and comments on forum/blog, support, etc. Also, if you happen to use more than one computer, you will get the same ratings on all the computers you use.

With the WOT add-on installed, you will see a small doughnut like icon next to your browser’s address bar.The icon shows you the site’s rating: green indicates a trustworthy site, yellow tells you to be cautious, red indicates potential danger, and grey indicates that the website doesn’t have enough ratings to determine the reputation the the website.

I like the feature that along with a color rating, the user must also choose a reason for their selection if I am submitting a rating for a website. So If I, for example, label a site as bad, I must also check the box(es) to let the WOT community know if I found malware, adult content, hate, phishing, spam, popups, etc. If you are registered, you can also leave a detailed review for the same.

Since WOT heavily relies on user ratings, someone could easily spam the system with tons of false ratings and rate down their competitors or otherwise manipulate reputations for their own good, but according to WOT, that’s not true. According to them, to keep ratings more reliable, the system tracks each user’s rating behavior before deciding how much it trusts the user. Also, WOT applies sophisticated algorithms to detect and eliminate any manipulation of reputation. However, I think that there are workaround(s) for the same (you may call me skeptic for this).

Also, not everyone will have the same opinion about a website, so you may sometimes find a site that is perfectly fine but with a rating indicating otherwise because perhaps for some users their experience with the site wasn’t good for whatever reason. So if you encounter sites with yellow or orange color rating, check the explanation for the site’s rating and user reviews.

If you open a bad website, you first land on a warning screen by WOT. WOT helps you to decide, but the final decision is yours: you can skip the warning and enter the site, or return to the previous page.

If you already use this add-on please share your thoughts on the same in the comments section below. If you don’t, download this plugin from the above provided link and share your views in the comments!  You can also follow Web of Trust on Facebook!

Disclaimer: This is a review opportunity via BlogsRelease, all opinions are 100% authors and authors alone.

Ishaan Farooq

Hi, I am Ishaan Farooq, let me introduce myself. I am a Tech Blogger from Lucknow, India and am a big Techo Freak who loves to Surf Internet the whole day and is a Modding, Programming and Customization Enthusiast.