Browse the Internet safely using MyWOT

Posted on March 23, 2008 at 6:03 am

Recently, I had written about a new software from McAfee called SiteAdvisor, which helps to protect your computer from malware, spyware, viruses, and spam sites while browsing the Internet for free! Having this type of preventive software is great because there are many times when you may not be sure whether a site that shows up in the search results in actually legitimate or simply spam.

MyWOT is another free program that has a rating for millions of websites and that tries to keep you safe from Internet scams, shady online vendors, spam, spyware, and viruses. It never hurts to have more than one of these programs running at the same time, you never know when one service might have a website flagged before the other one does.

The cool thing about MyWOT is that it doesn’t just keep a record of sites that are spammy or that spread viruses, but also warns you of sites that are known to be Internet scams or vendors that are known to be fake sellers, etc. Web of Trust is an online community for reputation rating that gets their ratings from Internet users sharing their knowledge and via hundreds of trusted online sources that have lists of phishing sites, etc.

It’s pretty easy to setup MyWOT on your computer, first download the add-on for IE or Firefox.

When you search in Google, you’ll now see a small icon next to each web link: green for go, yellow to be careful, and right to stop!

Another nice thing about MyWOT is that it works with the other major search engines, including Yahoo and MSN and it also works with other types of sites and services, such as Gmail, Digg, del.icio.us, AOL, and Wikipedia.

Clicking on a link with a red circle next to it will bring up a custom page warning you that you are visiting a site that is known to be dangerous, but giving you a link to continue anyway if you want.

Finally, you can also submit your own ratings for any site that you site since it is a community based service. A new button appears at the top and when you click it you get a drop down of different ratings you can assign to the website for various categories, including Reliability, Shopping, Privacy, and Child Safety.

Overall, MyWOT has over 17 million web sites rating so far, which is quite a large database of sites. Also, no one user can swing the tide against a site in a malicious way if it’s truly reputable. MyWOT uses the scores of their horde of users in combination, which makes it more trustworthy.

Overall, it’s a great service that should be used in addition to having anti-virus, anti-spam software installed on your computer. If you can use it in conjunction with SiteAdvisor, that’s even better! Enjoy!

[tags]MyWOT, web of trust, online reputation ratings, protecting from spam, protection from malware, safer Internet[/tags]

» Filed Under Cool Websites

Comments

3 Responses to “Browse the Internet safely using MyWOT”

Doug Woodall said on : March 23rd, 2008 at 9:15 am

Thanks Aseem,
I had noticed WOT a while back and I thought I would wait and see how it did. It sounds good form the posts in their Forum and the reviews so far.
I liked SiteAdvisor alot back in the old days till McAfee bought it.
I’ll try it out.
Take care,

James Goodwin said on : November 16th, 2008 at 9:47 pm

Not a really great idea letting Novices rate sites.”

In theory it sounds good, but not a good idea, read my reasons why below.

It is never a good idea to let novices rate websites because they usually just write whatever they want, whether it is true or not, also if a competitor of some website decides to write bad stuff there is no recourse for the targeted website.

They also use references that either don’t resolve or there is nothing to back them up. For instance they list advancedsearchbar.com and it does nothing bad, no malware, no adware, no spyware, and Advanced Searchbar has be reviewed in PC World, PC Magazine, CPU Magazine, and is listed on Wikipedia, Download.com (5 stars), Tucows (5 Cows) but yet WOT lists it as Dangerous. Go figure. Not one thing to back it up and they won’t remove the dangerous label. You are better off using SiteAdvisor, but they all stink because you are using the advice of novice users with too much free time on their hands.

Protect your computer from malware using Haute Secure Says:

[...] We see more requests for the end user to participate in sending information to the security businesses to help build their product databases. Earlier I had written an article on MyWOT, a free community service to protect yourself against phishing and spyware. [...]
July 31st, 2008 at 5:19 am