Search engine methods and secret algorithms were in the news after the New York Times wrote earlier this week about a shady online vendor who encouraged bad reviews to manipulate his site’s ranking within Google. Unsuspecting customers were ripped off and abused without any indication that they were dealing with a scammer. Consumers would have been well served to see WOT’s crowd-sourced reputation ratings so they would know which sites are trustworthy or not. Instead, they learned from cold, hard experience.
Search engine DuckDuckGo has taken the initiative and built in the WOT safe surfing option to protect their users from clicking on untrustworthy sites with a record of bad customer service. By turning on a simple setting on DuckDuckGo’s Result Settings page, searchers can see the crowd-sourced ratings collected by website reputation rating system Web of Trust (WOT.) The traffic light style WOT reputation ratings appear next to links, so users will be able to see immediately which sites are good, which are questionable and which to steer clear of.