This post is part of TechAirlines' biweekly PrizeFly series. Every other Monday, we compare key features of 2-4 similar products and crown one as the "prized flyer".
Do you use search engines? Ever wonder which sites are safe to visit? By the time you actually visit the site, it might already be too late. Web reputation and site rating services are here to help.
These products and services place icons next to search result links to indicate a site’s safety level.
A search for 'Free screensavers' brings up many results. But which ones are safe to use and which aren't?
Table of Contents
About the Contestants
Round 1 – Rating Accuracy and Update Frequency
Round 2 – Search Safety Icons
Round 3 – Website Ratings
Round 4 – Malicious Site Warnings
Bonus Round 1 – Secure Search
Bonus Round 2 – Browser Support
Results!
About the Contestants
Web of Trust (WOT for short) is a community based web reputation service by WOT Services. Its ratings are entirely calculated by a global community of millions of users. It’s the only one of our contestants that isn’t created by an antivirus company. Also unlike the others, WOT is focused on user trust of a website instead of just general security.
McAfee SiteAdvisor is a site rating service from the antivirus company, McAfee. It’s rating are calculated using an automated web scanner that checks websites for malicious downloads, malicious external links, spam-like emails, and annoyances, like tracking cookies.
Norton SafeWeb is a site rating service from the antivirus company, Symantec. Like SiteAdvisor, its rating are also calculated using an automated web scanner checking websites for security risks. It was originally exclusively part of Norton Internet Security and Norton 360, but they recently released a free Lite version that works regardless of whether or not the security suite is installed. The Lite version seems to have the same features as the version included with the suites.
Round 1 – Rating Accuracy and Update Frequency
If the service has a lot of inaccuracies with ratings, then it can be considered useless and even misleading. Obviously, none of our contestants can be perfect as sites are always changing, but the ratings should be regularly updated.
Rating accuracy and update frequency are combined into the same round because one usually influences the other.
WOT
While many may think that ratings completely calculated by the community may have many inaccuracies but the WOT Team developed very advanced algorithms. Not all users have an equal say. New users have very little influence on the ratings. More experienced users with more comments (and people agreeing with their comment) and ratings have a significantly greater influence on the ratings.
The WOT Forum allows anyone to request the community to rate their website and a full rating could be live within 30 minutes
In addition, when a site changes, anyone can post a thread on the forums asking for others to review it and the rating can quickly be reviewed and changed by the large community. This allows ratings to be accurately updated very quickly.
SiteAdvisor
For McAfee SiteAdvisor, updates to it seem to be happening very slowly. Verified website owners are allowed to post a special comment on their site scorecard, however, this doesn’t submit a rating dispute request to McAfee. To dispute ratings, webmasters would have to send them an email. According to their Webmaster 
FAQ, rating disputes via email can take several business days.
Each community user has a certain reputation level (out of 9) based on votes they get for helpful comments.
So far I’ve never noticed any site have their ratings change to something else besides unrated. Several sites were marked as red, but is currently gray (unrated). Many sites, including TechAirlines, used to have green, but now are gray.
SafeWeb
While SafeWeb is also rated by an automated scanner, ratings seem to be updated a lot faster than SiteAdvisor. Their FAQ states their the frequency of updates is based on the amount of traffic a site gets.
They are also quite fast at responding to rating disputes. I’ve seen a medium traffic site request a re-review and this was completed within 24 hours.
SafeWeb was very inaccurate when it was first launched, but its slowly getting better, though I still find quite a number of mistakes.
They also offer a community rating, which is a rating (out of 5.0) generated by community ratings. Unlike WOT, everyone has equal say here. The community rating is entirely separate from the Norton rating.
Round 1 Results
WOT takes this round for having the fastest updates backed up for a large community, followed by Norton and SiteAdvisor.
WOT: 5
SiteAdvisor: 3
SafeWeb: 3
Round 2 – Search Safety Icons
What sites does each service show safety icons for?
WOT
WOT shows safety icons in five different colors, dark green, light green, yellow, orange, and red in four different categories, Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, Privacy, and Child Safety. By default, these icons show on all external links on 24 different sites, including popular search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, AOL, etc…), email (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail), as well as various other sites, like Digg and Wikipedia.
WOT also offers a custom API that allows any webmaster to place Javascript rating icons next to external links on their website. This widget is also used on the WOT website.
In addition, the WOT scorecards also display a rating trust level based on the number of users who rated it. If many users rated a site a certain level, then a higher number of people would be displayed (out of 5).
SiteAdvisor
McAfee has 3 colors and icons, green, yellow, and red. Green indicates a safe site, yellow indicates a potentially dangerous one, and red indicates a dangerous site.
The hovercard displays the rating as well as the number of red downloads, linked site rating, email, as well as annoyances.
Strangely, it does not display any yellow downloads.
If a site holds a McAfee Secure seal, the seal will also show on the search results and on the hover card.
The free version supports search icons on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask.com, and 15 other search engines.
SafeWeb
Like SiteAdvisor, SafeWeb has the same 3 colors. In addition, safe e-commerce sites also hold an extra shopping cart icon, although this seems to be pending removal soon.
SafeWeb’s hover card shows the number of Computer Threats, Identity Threats, and Annoyances. In addition, if the site is e-Commerce, additional icons are shown.
It supports search icons on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Ask.com.
Round 2 Results
SiteAdvisor and SafeWeb are very similar here in the way they show why a site received the rating they did. WOT takes this round for having the a simple info card as well as ratings in 5 colors in 4 categories. In addition, it supports the most diverse range of sites. SiteAdvisor ties with WOT for providing a very informative scorecard, although not supporting as many sites.
WOT: 5 (10 total)
SiteAdvisor: 5 (8 total)
SafeWeb: 3 (6 total)
Round 3 – Website Ratings
When you’re browsing websites, you want to know if they’re safe or not even if you don’t go through a search engine. How efficient are our contestants at fetching ratings on the fly? How informative is the rating card?
WOT
WOT is the only one solely based on community ratings. The rating card shows in the browser toolbar and allows users to rate the site. It also has a announcement panel at the bottom, a link to a user’s profile, as well as a link to the site scorecard.
Except for the Safari version, the toolbar icon’s color matches the site’s overall rating, although this can be customized in Settings.
SiteAdvisor
SiteAdvisor displays as a colored bar in Internet Explorer’s toolbar or Firefox’s status bar. Next to it is the optional Secure Search (refer to Bonus Round 1).
Hover over the bar for a few seconds reveals the the same scorecard shown in search results.
McAfee Rating Card with McAfee Secure. This is the rating card for mcafee.com.
Clicking on the bar opens the site rating page. Unfortunately, this opens in a new window rather than a new tab and I found this to be extremely irritating.
The bar is larger than the default Firefox status bar, which causes a loss of some vertical screen estate.
SafeWeb
Norton SafeWeb creates a new toolbar with the security rating button as well as Norton Safe Search (refer to Bonus Round 1 below).
Clicking on the SafeWeb button shows the same rating card as search results.
Norton Site Safety
Round 3 Results
WOT takes this round for providing the most useful and interactive rating card. Norton and McAfee tie at second.
WOT: 5 (15 total)
SiteAdvisor: 3.5 (11.5 total)
SafeWeb: 3.5 (9.5 total)
Round 4 – Malicious Site Warnings
WOT Warning Screen
WOT is on a perfect streak. The final round that determines it all is warnings of visiting a dangerous site. If you made a typo when typing a domain, there’s a chance that someone created a malicious typo-squat site. How well do our contestants prevent users from visiting malicious sites and interacting with them?
WOT
WOT provides two options, warning or blocking. In addition, users can set the rating level (very poor, poor, or unsatisfactory) that they want WOT to start warning them about.
Warning means that the site would still load and WOT fetches ratings asynchronously. If the rating is dangerous, it darkens the screen and gives a warning.
Blocking means that before the site can even load, WOT will fetch the ratings. If its dangerous, WOT will prevent the site from loading all together. This can be useful as parental control as well as to prevent malicious drive-by-downloads. This feature is only available for Firefox and Internet Explorer and because it needs to fetch ratings first, it causes a slight delay in browsing.
WOT blocked access to this site.
SiteAdvisor
When a site is dangerous, the rating card automatically popups without any user interaction. This serves as the warning.
SafeWeb
SafeWeb loads ratings while the page is loading. However, if the site is marked as red, Norton will show a blocked page with an option to continue anyway. Unlike WOT, the site still loads first anyway).
Norton Blocked Site
Round 4 Results
WOT takes this round for having the best set of options as well as an effective blocking method. Norton comes in second for having a blocking method, but the site still loads first. SiteAdvisor trails third for having almost no warning.
WOT: 5 (20 total)
SiteAdvisor: 1.5 (13 total)
SafeWeb: 3.5 (14 total)
And our winner is… no wait… there’s more! You know what time it is… Bonus Points!
Bonus Round 1 – Secure Search
Wouldn’t it be great to use a search engine that would automatically filter out malicious search results? All three of our contestants feature their own version of secure search.
WOT
WOT SafeSearch is powered by Surfcanyon. Rating icons show here even if you don’t have the add-on installed. There’s options to filter out potentially unwanted results.
There is no search bar included with the add-on, so its not considered a feature.
WOT: No Bonus Points
SiteAdvisor
SiteAdvisor places a large Secure Search bar next to the rating button. This is powered by Yahoo! Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything special about this. It still loads a regular Yahoo! search results page that only shows ratings if the add-on is installed.
This feature seems absolutely useless and a waste of space, so McAfee is actually losing points this round. Luckily, it can be disabled.
SiteAdvisor: -2 bonus points (11 total)
SafeWeb
Norton SafeSearch Options
There are options to filter out dangerous results as well as only show Safe Shopping sites.
This could be a potentially useful feature, but of course, the search bar can be hidden.
SafeWeb: +2 bonus points (16 total)
The only contestant that benefited from this round was SafeWeb.
Bonus Round 2 – Browser Support
Which browsers does each contestant support?
WOT has an official add-on for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari. There is also a special bookmarklet for other browsers that displays a site’s ratings when clicking on.
SiteAdvisor and SafeWeb both only support Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox at this time.
WOT: +2 bonus points (22 total)
Results!
How many total points did each contestant score?
Congratulations to Web of Trust!
Now let’s hear your thoughts. What’s your favorite of our three contestants? Vote in the poll below and leave your thoughts in the comments.
This concludes this week’s edition of PrizeFly Friday. Be sure to join us next week for another exciting comparison!
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