Installed software
WOT (Web of Trust) from WOT Services is the Editor's Choice because it leads in many areas: compatibility and integration with seamless operation; flexible options; searching; warning and blocking; and user input. It only loses in areas that it doesn't compete in: meta-rating (combining the results from several raters as in Link Extend) and scanning.
WOT is the best implemented and the best documented rater - you can even view the source code. It is also the most heavily criticized. For these reasons I'm using it to discuss many of the features that can be found in raters.
Rating scorecards
The WOT scorecard shows ratings for four WOT Rating Categories. Don't confuse these with the sixteen Community (user) comment categories. The comment categories do not affect the ratings. It's a shame that many critics of WOT do not realize this.
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Trustworthiness - WOT calculates this with information from trusted sources and user feedback.
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Vendor Reliability - Does this website provide a positive shopping experience? What's the product or service like? Is the information factual or fabricated?
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Privacy - Can the website be trusted with your personally identifiable information? Does it produce spam or phishing schemes?
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Child Safety - Is the website safe for young children? Does it have material (e.g. pornography), games (e.g. age-restricted games), multimedia (e.g. music with explicit lyrics), or forums (e.g. political or religious viewpoints) that is better reserved for adults?
Warning and blocking
WOT is very good at warning and blocking. You decide how to handle each of the four rating categories. Specify the level of danger you are prepared to accept - red, orange, or yellow - and then whether you want a warning or a block. You can also include unrated sites if you don't want them to slip through by default. WOT's block screen will redirect you to WOT or open in a new tab, but will not take you to a risky site unless you specifically chose to ignore the warning. It's up to you which step you take next:
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Ignore the WOT warning and go to the website;
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Rate the site if you disagree with WOT's rating;
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View rating details and comments about the website;
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Use your browser to take some other action: surf to a different website, close the tabbed window, go back, use a bookmark, etc.
Searching
Like most raters, WOT has a safe search option. It's provided by Surf Canyon based on Bing. WOT also has more search options to choose from. You can select the rating you want to see in the search results: the default "optimized" rating, the lowest rating, or the trustworthiness rating by itself. WOT ratings also appear for more search engines and other services than any other product:
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English search engines: AOL, Ask, Bing, Google, Yahoo!
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Non-english search engines: China - Baidu; Czech - Seznam, WebHledani; Korea - Naver; Russia - Rambler, Yandex;
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Metasearch engines and reference: Dogpile, Inquick, Search, Wikipedia
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Social networks and messaging: Facebook, Gmail, Mail Ru, Twitter, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail
User ratings
WOT has a comprehensive set of sixteen categories for user ratings and comments. When I collated these categories for all the programs I reviewed, I found that WOT covers all of them except three. As is expected, the majority of ten cater for negative ratings, there are five for positive ratings, and one for neutral comments.
 I found McAfee Site Advisor to be solid but unexceptional. It falls well short of WOT in its features, ratings, and safety. It just didn't warn me about enough bad websites which is surprising because the online check at McAfee Threat Intelligence does. Despite its average performance in detecting threats, it did find problems such as browser exploits that WOT was not aware of. I also like using the website report which includes a list of downloads and a diagram of linked sites.
Like WOT, it supports all the main english-speaking search engines.plus several foreign-language portals. But compared with WOT, it runs on fewer systems and web browsers. It was slower. In most areas it has has fewer features. Some things I wanted (e.g. email and IM link scanning) require an upgrade to the paid version, SiteAdvisor Live. User ratings and comments are less useful and appear to be totally ignored for rating purposes anyway. I couldn't even challenge errors of fact that other users had made. A small irritation in search results is that it's icon was obscured by the Web Security Guard icon and itself obscured other icons (M86 Secure Browsing, Norton Safe Web).
If you already use McAfee products then there will be some synergy such as using your existing registration. SiteAdvisor is also one part of McAfee Web Security which also provides the SECURE trustmark and SECURE shopping for websites. I think that it suffers from being the least important part which is a problem common to several of these products that have commercial products for sale.
I have ranked AVG LinkScanner third because a scanner is useful if you don't have anti-virus on your computer that checks website links. Even though it was not very good at detecting threats it did detect and disarm threats from websites that the raters said were OK. This is the advantage of scanners.
LinkScanner is a well organized package. It looks like other AVG programs, installs in a similar manner, and is presented in the same modular manner. That's because it is assembled from some modules of AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition: LinkScanner, Security Toolbar, and Update Manager. So if you're using AVG Anti-Virus then you do not need need AVG LinkScanner. Two further modules, parental controls and online backup, are indicated as installable but are not free.
The LinkScanner module has two protective components:
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Surf-Shield checks websites for threats and runs independently of the browser. Scanners always slow you down but if they are based on anti-virus technology they will usually work with any browser. That's why Surf-Shield will still be working even if you switch off the browser add-ons. If you have a compatibility problem with other anti-virus software then turning off Surf-Shield will allow you to confirm this without uninstalling the whole program.
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Search-Shield gets ratings for any website address and inserts the safety ratings into your search results. It also runs as, or is linked with, the add-on called Safe Search. Search-Shield works with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari but not Opera.
The AVG Security Toolbar is an add-on so it can be disabled but you will lose easy access to the LinkScanner options, AVG Secure Search, and the Page Status for the current web page. Incidentally, you can also check any website address by clicking on the AVG LinkScanner component within AVG LinkScanner in the system tray.
LinkExtend  installed meta-rater
Linkular's  LinkExtend is the best installed meta-rater and it has an excellent reputation with users. But it really only works well with Firefox. The versions for Internet Explorer and Chrome force you to check the ratings manually by going to the sources. In addition, the Chrome version won't give ratings on search lists.
LinkExtend uses several other products for its safety rating: WOT, SiteAdvisor, Safe Web, Google Safe Browsing, Browser Defender, and Web Security Guard.. Just be careful, WOT can identify a bad site with active threats but LinkExtend's weighting algorithm does not always give it a bad safety rating. It also provides ratings for child safety and company ethics, and a lot of other information about a website's popularity, web traffic, age, my last visit, etc. As a result it has the busiest and largest toolbar in your browser. LinkExtend also has extensive options: the services to be used for each rating; what appears on the toolbar; what appears on the context menu; etc.
If you like quick access to a lot of information then LinkExtend is attractive. Just remember that it doesn't put up warning or block screens in Firefox and Internet Explorer. It does put up a warning in Chrome but well after the page has already loaded. It only provides ratings for result lists from two search engines: Google and Yahoo!. It is slow and seems to be slowest in Chrome. You will be able to see the website rating change as it checks with each source. As a meta-rater, it is only as good as the best rating it is given. More often than not, you won't know which one you should trust. You will probably need more information to compare the differing ratings so you will discover that you will have to go to each rater's website. That takes too long. For me, that has meant LinkExtend is only a distraction where I find myself saying "Oh, that is interesting!" or "I wonder why ...?". I decided to disable it temporarily only to discover that LinkExtend keeps re-enabling itself.
I have included Trend Micro's TrendProtect for one important reason. Those using Internet Explorer 6 or 7 need all the help they can get to keep safe. If Trend Micro developed it to work with all the browsers I would rate it much more highly. It correctly rates many bad websites but leaves too many good sites unrated. It also needs to work with more than just Google and Yahoo! searches. It was unusual because it uses content categories in a similar way to parental filters but without doing any blocking. So it not only warns about websites with poor ratings but also warns you if your safe website is in one of the categories you selected.
Online services
These online safety checks are less convenient but very useful.
VirusTotal online meta-rater/scanner + add-ons
VirusTotal has browser add-ons VTZilla and VTChromizer for Firefox and Chrome respectively. They put a shortcut to VirusTotal on the context menu for any web link so you can start the rating and scanning from there rather than having to go to the VirusTotal website.
VirusTotal checks websites against 13 rating services and blacklists. It also scans with 42 anti-virus engines. This battery of tests is its strength. Its weakness is that the reporting takes too long (minutes instead of seconds) when compared with the installed raters and scanners. But being web-based it will run with every browser. You can rate websites with comments in any of one positive category (benign) and five negative categories (browser exploit, malicious. malware download, phishing site, spam link). If you sign-up your ratings carry more weight than anonymous ratings. As is usual with many of these scanners, you are given the anti-virus scanner name, version, last update date and, most importantly, the result of the scan.
Trend Micro Site Safety gives a simple rating with the category of threat. It has equivalent accuracy to the other Trend Micro products so it is very good. If it had an installable version that would be recommended as a top product. I know that there is TrendProtect but it only works with Internet Explorer. While Web Protection Add-on works for all browsers it is only trial software.
URLVoid from NoVirusThanks Company is very similar to VirusTotal. It uses 17 rating services and blacklists but only 6 anti-virus scanners which makes it less effective. The rating and scanning are initiated separately so it is also less convenient. It is easier to see if there is a problem because results are color-coded: green for Clean, yellow for Suspicious, red for Dangerous/Infected, and gray for Unrated. URLVoid's website is a beta version but I had no problems and anyway it is less risky for my computer configuration than the installable betas like TrafficLight and Browser Guard.
Many online checkers have a lot of other tools. URLVoid has more than most: scan a file, scan an IP address, analyze a website for other issues, download a website's code without browsing it, unshorten URLs, etc.
You can search the McAfee's Threat Intelligence threat library for a URL or use one of the other categories including IP address, DNS server, malware name or the name of the vulnerability. In my tests it was nearly twice as effective as McAfee Site Advisor in identifying websites with active threats.
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Comments
Lots of bad links in the Supplement to this article.
I have both WOT and Link Extend as Firefox add ons. Plus Avast webrep which is pretty good. For link scanning, I also have Firefox's Scan It With Dr.Web.
In the next update to this article I'll be evaluating Avast Web Rep and Scan It with Dr. Web.
Bitdefender TrafficLight + WOT = the best way to a completely secure web browsing experience
Any plans to add Norton Safe Web to these tests?
Yes, I'll be reviewing it this month.
AVG Linkscanner won't install if you're using Avast Antivirus, possibly because the Avast package now has its own built-in internet security "rater" tool, which is similar to WOT. That said, WOT and Avast work well together, at least in Firefox.
Remah, please recheck all the links in this article. Some are simply just linking to www.techsupportalert.com instead of the site of the mentioned freeware.
Thanks. I've found and corrected them.
Great article Remah, thanks. :)
WOT is like Wikipedia. You have no idea at all what a rater/writer's agenda is, and because a lot of it is correct people are taking these sites as gospel when content may well reflect bias. I find it all the time on Wikipedia.
WOT cannot be trusted. A__nonymous is correct. Using mass rating tool by its Platinum members to give negative rating to thousand of websites is suspicious at best. Perhaps to buy its service to bring up your rating... That in itself is highly suspicious practice to strike fear in people and creating false sense of security running to them.
WOT's agenda seems clear, based on how the site 'works'
+ Every less-than-major site starts out with a negative rating,
+ Webpage owners are approached to buy a "WOT membership" -- making the service resemble a "protection racket"
+ any competitor can go to a website's WOT page to repeatedly click on "0's" without having to give a written reason for those ratings...the little fish in the big pool have no chance...unless they buy a "membership"
+ even with dozens of great comments, any site can get stuck with unsafe safety ratings because positive comments play no role in the end rating result
+ many negative comments are in languages other than English -- with no translation -- so they can't be easily understood, let alone responded to in English.
It is hard to see how "WOTs agenda is clear" from your comments. I presume that you mean WOT uses stand-over tactics to get money. The problem is that your comments don't support that argument due to errors of fact. Indeed, I'm mystified how the last comment relates at all.
I respond in the same order to your points. I reiterate what I've said before: it is not possible to build a perfect reputation rating system.
+ Actually, sites start with an unrated rating. They can get ratings from user ratings and trusted third-party lists. As far as I know, "less-than-major" sites are less likely to have a positive rating from those trusted third-party products.
+ It is clearly not a "protection racket" which involves the protectors being the enforcers without reference to any other party. WOT does nothing to rate a site bad without input from others, mainly the customers/users, because WOT is a clearinghouse for their assessments of a site. Here's a link to a similar complaint against WOT and the rebuttal:
http://www.ripoffreport.com/internet/web-of-trust/web-of-trust-wot-scam-...
+ Yes, malicious users can attack a site's reputation but they have to rate a lot of sites correctly for their ratings to carry much weight. I understand that some people are hateful enough to take the time and effort to do this: create multiple user accounts, provide many correct ratings to build up their user reputations, and then provide bad ratings targeted at just one site. In a similar manner, someone can pump up their site reputation. Or just get all their friends to give it an excellent rating.
+ Yes, ratings affect the site rating. Comments provide more information which I find most helpful to understand why a site gets a bad rating.
+ I'm glad that there are users leaving comments in other languages. Personally, I want WOT to be a global service because it will improve my browsing safety.
WOT (Web of Trust) has too much power to influence the rating of any particular site. The main issue is if the site represents a potential risk which can be identified by the main AV solutions, is not about user opinion, if they like or not like the site; opinions should not be a part of the rating at any point. Norton’s (safe web lite + DNS) approach is much more trusted and your stubbornness in defending your illogical decision shows bias. Bias and a defensive stance seem to be a common response on this website when someone disagrees with the so called editors.
This is trolling. Had it not been for Remah's constructive reply, this comment would already have been deleted. We provide ample opportunity for folks to give feedback about the site, it's content and how it is run, but as with everywhere else, this must be done within the rules (see rule #7).
You're right. It's just my first day back in the "office". :)
Good to see you back :)
The tone and content of your comment suggests that you have not read this article and its supplement. Nor do you appear to have tested and compared the ability of each product to protect against Internet-sourced threats. I did, and it was several weeks of work. I did it so other users don't have to. I didn't do it to state my opinion which was, at the time, decidedly against WOT.
I designed the tests to show up WOT. But WOT performed very well whether I only used sites with actual threats confirmed by AV products or I included sites rated as risky on a broader range of measures. WOT's broad range of inputs (including AV blacklists) ensures this.
PS I will be testing the products again when I get time.
WOT is highest rated here because it is effective despite obvious shortcomings. I found that bias is fairly easy to identify but you have to look at the complete scorecard and not just the overall rating.
I will not argue with your point. However, we have chosen WOT on this site as our "standard". In other words, we only allow green or yellow rated WOT sites to be posted here. We do not allow sites to be posted that are red-rated by WOT.
Has anyone had positive experiences with the TrafficLight extension from Bitdefender ? I have it installed and no downside yet, just not sure of there is a lot of value at this point.
Thanks !
In my tests all versions of the TrafficLight beta were only average for protection.
The Firefox extension worked the best with the Chrome and Safari extensions significantly less effective and the full install having too many problems.
I'll test it again once the product is finished.
I am a strong advocate for WOT. I recommend it to all, but there is one negative issue you fail to mention. WOT is great for catching rogue sites, but there is an issue with false positives. Often a political or religious site receives a poor rating because many people rate them as malicious simply because they disagree with the content. If you use it knowing this you can usually safely ignore any warnings if a site is political or religious.
I do discuss that issue in the Supplement. False positives are not much of a problem from the user perspective which is the basis for the review.
I've recently found some of the US religious sites that have bad ratings simply because people don't like what they say. Although I don't think they accurately represent what the Bible says, most of these sites have been badly rated simply for expressing their views.
My approach is to avoid them unless I really wanted something from them. In practice, this may save me further problems because forceful and extreme views seem to motivate people to do things that are unnacceptable. On the one hand, those against those sites have provided falsified ratings. For example, giving bad ratings for "Vendor reliability" when the sites sell nothing. On the other hand, a supporter of one of those sites, probably the author, used a feature of this site to insert a hidden link to his site. Our excellent moderators detected it here but who knows what problems I might have at their site.
I haven't noticed this, but of course people circulate around different sites. Do you have any statistics to support your claims? The most popular conservative, or leaning conservative, sites have dark green ratings, such as Drudge Report, RealClearPolitics, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, etc.
Now on other matters (and not in response to the above poster) I'd like to note that a lot of people in the comments are confused about how WOT works. It's important that someone (for the sake of sanity) warn visitors that some of these recent comments lack perspective and understanding of WOT.
To curious readers, it's worth researching WOT's algorithm and understanding some of the following: the automated black lists WOT draws from, the safe guards for unusual voting patterns (the algorithm lessens the votes of some if the raters are biased), and the steps sites can take to improve their rating.
Not to lecture, but it doesn't surprise me that some are confused about how WOT works; many people don't understand how democracy works either. It reminds me of voters who believe voting for a president is their most important democratic duty, and forget, as Yoda might say, one person a democracy does not make (it's actually the least democratically meaningful vote possible within a democracy).
Some people are also misunderstanding the way WOT voting works, the way the votes are weighted, and the way WOT draws from blacklists automatically. Additionally, no one has supported their claims about bias in WOT by providing statistics to help us understand whether the bias is as common as finding a Ralph Nader supporter or is as common as finding a major party supporter. Are these claims about bias mere conspiracy theory masquerading as objective reporting? It's mean to suggest that these claims might be conspiracy theory, but I don't know if they are or are not without evidence to support them.
Thanks Rizar :)
You're partly right about this. The thing that bothers me, though, is that since they falsely rate so many conservative/religious sites as dangerous when they are actually safe, I have to wonder if there are malicious (i.e., malware etc.) liberal/anti-religious sites that they rate as safe. What's that old trial-lawyers' maxim, false in one, false in all? I've long since given up on using WOT, much less trusting it.
I don't trust WOT either but I will continue to use it because it is very effective protection. If a site I want to look at is blocked I always check the scorecard and see whether the negative rating is from third-party blacklists or from user ratings or both. Of all the rating products WOT makes it easier to work out whether user ratings are accurate or not.