Webutation, Website Reputation Information

When you are on the Internet you face a dilemma. You do not know an awful lot about new sites that you visit. You do not know much about the company or people that operate a website for instance. That may not be a problem on sites that you just access for information, but what about shopping sites or sites where you enter personal information like your email address?

You’d probably want to know if you can trust a site with those information. Website reputation services in theory speed up the time it takes to come to a conclusion. Instead of having to search for information on search engines you could use their ratings to assess a website’s reputation more easily.

Experienced Internet users know that it is often not sufficient to use just one service for that. These services can be manipulated easily, for instance with fake user comments and ratings.

Webutation is a meta service that lists ratings from multiple services when user look up domain names on the website. The reputation service includes its own review service as well as the site’s Google Safebrowsing, Website Antivirus, Web of Trust and G-Rated / Child Safety rating. These ratings are then used to calculate the Webutation score.

You also see the site’s Google Pagerank and Alexa rank listed there. Some entries have an Info link next to them. If you hover your mouse cursor over them you will see additional information about the rating.

The only other option that you have is to switch from Rating to Twitter Buzz to see some of the recent Twitter messages that references the domain name.

I personally like Webutation as it combines the rating of multiple reputation and security services. It is still recommended to rely on other sources, e.g. a manual web search for issues related to the domain.

A Firefox add-on with mixed reviews is available as well. It basically displays the webutation rating of the active website in the browser’s toolbar.

Are you using reputation services? If so, which is your favorite?

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Friday October 21, 2011 -
Tags:antivirus, google safe search, reputation, web of trust, webutation

Responses so far:

1. TechBuzzard says:

   October 21, 2011 at 4:59 pm

   I use Avast WebRep, WOT and Norton Safe Web Lite.

   Reply
2. tinwheeler says:

   October 21, 2011 at 7:50 pm

   Martin, Would you recommend the Firefox Add-On or the Bookmarklet? I currently use WoT and would like to give this a try. Thanks

   Reply
   • Martin Brinkmann says:

     October 21, 2011 at 7:54 pm

     There is a bookmarklet out for the service? It depends on your needs. If you want all pages evaluated you should pick the Firefox add-on, if you only need some pages (manually) evaluated use the bookmarklet. The latter does not consume any memory when not in use.

     Reply
3. Jupiter says:

   October 21, 2011 at 8:19 pm

   I have been using WOT firefox extension for a while now. I discovered webutation not long ago, and I have been using the website to double check.

   Reply
4. tinwheeler says:

   October 21, 2011 at 8:27 pm

   Martin, I can’t get Webutation to play nice with Firefox 3.6.23 but the Bookmarklet works good. If you click on the Uber Webutation tab there is a Bookmarklet you can drag to your toolbar. I appreciate any suggestions. Thanks again

   Reply