12 replies to this topic

[harpsound]

A user rating system that seems to be just launching.
Web of Trust.
I love the concept and am actively looking at incorporating their logo etc into my sites.
They have few webmaster goodies yet.
Good PR long term for us.

I do not see any pitfalls to speak of OTHER THAN they have a "sales" department.
What are they going to sell?
Obviously they will be collecting info but what and who would buy it?

My WOT

They are Firefox compatible and an IE version was announced yesterday.

Stephen V

[qwerty]

Not a bad idea, but...
What would happen if a bunch of people got together to promote some sites and give negative ratings to others? Depending on how many people are already involved in this thing, they could potentially turn future prospects away from their competitors.

Hopefully they have a way to tell if a user sets up multiple profiles, or if a number of users seem to be providing very similar feedback on the same sites.

[harpsound]

Not a bad idea, but...
What would happen if a bunch of people got together to promote some sites and give negative ratings to others? Depending on how many people are already involved in this thing, they could potentially turn future prospects away from their competitors.

Hopefully they have a way to tell if a user sets up multiple profiles, or if a number of users seem to be providing very similar feedback on the same sites.

Looked around there site and the settings.
It is really a well crafted little toolbar.
And like the Gbar it will be collecting data.
The "trust" part is bait to get access to your browsing data.
In theory they get every view you browse.
In the first instance the data correletes with your IP address.
Not sure how valuable that data is but they must think it has sales potential.

S

[harpsound]

The algorithm is supposed to handle the trust/click fraud angle.
Hmmmm...
Does it really matter if that trust data is not being sold and is publicly viewable?
Are they reall good at spotting the fraud or are they willing to have a little slippage?
Hmmmm......

S

[Esa Suurio]

The algorithm is supposed to handle the trust/click fraud angle.
Hmmmm...
Does it really matter if that trust data is not being sold and is publicly viewable?
Are they reall good at spotting the fraud or are they willing to have a little slippage?
Hmmmm......

S

Hi,

I would like to answer your questions. As you mentioned WOT gets it data from its user community: it is a platform where WOT users can share their knowledge on websites. The system uses very sophisticated algorithms to calculate the reputation of each website. Statistical analysis will reveal attempts to manipulate the data. Obviously we can not guarantee 100% accuracy, but based on our own observations and the feedback from our users WOT provides ratings that are more accurate than those given by any other system on the market.

In order to keep ratings more reliable, WOT also tracks each user's rating behavior before deciding how much it trusts the user. In other words, not everyone has an equal say in WOT. You must prove yourself before we take you seriously. This makes it even harder to manipulate the system.

In addition to the ratings provided by the users, WOT uses trusted sources to enriche the reputation data. These sources include listings of phishing sites, for example. The data coming from these sources is also processed by our statistical analysis and - in some cases - verified by our staff.

WOT software collects information only for computing website ratings, performing statistical analysis and for preventing abuse of our service. Any information that is no longer needed for these purposes is deleted. When loading reputations for the websites you visit, the software sends to our service only the encrypted host name, and any ratings you may choose to give. The information about visited domains is stored only temporarily for computing ratings. Your IP address is never stored in our database.

I hope that this covers your questions.

Regards,

Esa

Edited by Esa Suurio, 18 December 2007 - 05:57 AM.

[1dmf]

So I could build myself up as a trusted user, then give all my competitors a bad rating?

How can a program work out intent?

How can it know I genuinely think a website is rubbish compared to deliberatley giving a rubbish score.

This is huey!

[qwerty]

Esa, thanks for answering our questions, and welcome to HR

So I could build myself up as a trusted user, then give all my competitors a bad rating?

Based on what Esa wrote, I assume the trust you'd built up would be trashed fairly quickly, especially if those ratings weren't backed up by numerous (random) others.

[1dmf]

But my point is, how can a piece of software or even another human moderator know if i'm deliberately giving a poor score, or it's actually my personal opinion.

The point of any voting system is having the right to give something a good or bad rating based on your own personal opinion, you can't penalise someone because they haven't given a rating you'd prefer and so assume they are deliberately rating something poor.

Until mind reading has been invented and made legal (hmm , god help us when that happens! - 'Thought Police', what a scary thought , I take it you've seen The Minority Report!)

Anyway until then there is no way of prooving otherwise.

[qwerty]

Well, if you give one site a bad rating, that's one thing, but you wrote that you might "give all my competitors a bad rating". If you did that, you'd have to spread them out over time to hide what you're doing, I'd imagine.

[Hank Cowdog]

Well, if you give one site a bad rating, that's one thing, but you wrote that you might "give all my competitors a bad rating". If you did that, you'd have to spread them out over time to hide what you're doing, I'd imagine.

And I would think that if you hated a site that everyone else loved, that would tend to lower your credibility.

[1dmf]

And I would think that if you hated a site that everyone else loved, that would tend to lower your credibility.

huh? it might make your rating get diluted, but how does that lower your credability?

Just coz eveyone else likes it doesn't mean I do.

This is why i would never use or trust these types of systems, they are either unreliable or unfair!

[qwerty]

I'm afraid consensus is the only way this sort of thing could work. Then again, while majority rules, I would think that someone who's demonstrated a level of expertise on a particular subject should be given a bit of extra weight. If someone who really knows their stuff about (for example) lederhosen, and expresses a minority view on a site about lederhosen, I can't imagine that a good system would simply bury their view. Instead, something like that ought to prompt a community (or a system that tracks a community) to try to find out why this expert has this opinion.

[Esa Suurio]

I should have kept my eyes on this conversation not to miss it. Anyway, I try to cover some of the questions.
The reliability of the reputations improves as the system gathers more supporting evidence in terms of users' ratings and information from trusted sources. The rating window shows an icon that is composed of tiny human figures indicating the amount of supporting evidence: 1 represents the minimum confidence, 5 the maximum. The confidence level of one means that we have only little evidence and we encourage you to give your rating to improve the reliability.


In order to keep ratings more reliable, WOT also tracks each user's rating behavior before deciding how much it trusts the user. In other words, not everyone has an equal say in WOT. You must prove yourself before we take you seriously. This makes it even harder to manipulate the system. Of course we cannot read people's minds, but we have seen that the system really works in real life while it has been tested for more than a year.

We do not even claim that WOT will give 100% accurate information - there is no way to obtain that. At the end of the day the question what is good and what's not is pretty subjective. And that is why WOT employs the same approach that the entire Internet: it is open and driven by the users.