Press

Search engine methods were in the news after the New York Times wrote 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. Search engine DuckDuckGo has 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 aggregated 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.

"DuckDuckGo has been the leader in removing spam, protecting privacy, and using crowd-sourced information to improve results. With the addition of WOT's crowd-sourced ratings, DuckDuckGo plus WOT is the perfect solution to search with peace of mind," said CEO and DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg.

“The WOT community is better at detecting scam sites than automated systems alone. It requires input from real consumers to identify bad customer service,” said Vesa Perälä, CEO of WOT. “DuckDuckGo is proactive in showing their users if a merchant has a good or bad reputation. Other search engines would benefit from using WOT data in their search methods.”

About WOT Services

WOT Services is the company behind Web of Trust (WOT), the leading community-based safe surfing tool that uses an intuitive traffic-light rating system to help web users stay safe as they search, surf and shop online. Web site ratings are powered by a fast growing worldwide community of 16 million users who have rated the reputation of 30 million websites based on their experiences in terms of trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. The add-on works with Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari and is a 100% free download.

About DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is a general purpose search engine that was founded in 2008 and now has a strong following. DuckDuckGo helps you find information faster through its easier to understand results, which contain Zero-click Info, official sites, and much less spam. DuckDuckGo also protects user privacy by not storing personally identifiable information.