DuckDuckGo/WOT search partnership | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo/WOT search partnership

gabrielweinberg.com

24 pointsmarilyn12 comments

I own an ecommerce business which is very reputable. My BBB rating is A+ and i can back up my legitimacy with other third-party rating sites like Google, Yahoo, Citysearch, Judy's Book, etc.. For some reason my site has been flagged as having 51/100 for Vendor Reliability, 53/100 for Privacy (we're PCI compliant - wtf) and 55/100 for Child Safety. All i can say is all three of these ratings are completely a joke. I have no idea how they came up with these ratings.

It is very easy to manipulate their so called 'Reputation Scorecard'. I have no 'trust' in a company that is so easy to manipulate ratings with.

I use GoDaddy's domain name service so some people wrote on WOT that because the domain name servers are related to some people sending spam, then I must send spam too.

Nice, Web of Trust can kiss my ass. Anyone can write anything they want on there. I am also a pimp and a nuclear scientist.

I'm not so sure this is going to be a beneficial partnership for DDG. It might hurt the quality of the search results.

When I was looking into this sort of market (website trust metrics/scam+spam defense) WoT was the biggest player but their accuracy was absolutely horrible which made it near useless.

It is not the default, and currently only used for display purposes when turned on. I've gotten a lot of requests for this setting to be made available.

Hi Gabriel. Would it be possible to have the option to see both the WoT icons and the Favicons? I'm not sold on the WoT yet, but when I try it, I immediately miss the favicons..

Yeah, that is something I'm working on, but wanted to get this out in the mean time.

Agreed. WOT is terrible with accuracy. As some of the posts mention below, without a trusted review process, WOT is simply unmoderated user-generated content.

WOT has proven itself over the last couple weeks to me to be incredibly untrustworthy, dominated by "platinum" members who rate and comment down sites without having done any actual research on the business, and who absolutely will not correct erroneous ratings and comments when factual data such as BBB ratings, PCI certification, news articles and customer testimonials clearly tell a different tale. If you look in the forums you can see the flagrant ignorance of these controlling users. Because the ratings are so heavily weighted toward the power WOT'ers who have dedicated months of their time to rating sites they know nothing about, you could have literally dozens of glowing ratings and comments by real customers and one or two of these heavy weights can drag down the site rating into the red. WOT is dangerous, misleading and a farce. ...and yet website owners have no choice but to dive into the chaos to try and fight back against this horrible system to attempt to protect their good names.

I ran WOT for a while. As I recall, I uninstalled after questions surfaced about its business model. It's been a while now. How does it stay in business?

They stay in business by not having much of a business to start off with. It's entirely crowdsourced and their core programs/extensions are hosted by other companies and haven't been majorly updated in quite a while as far as I can tell.

How they get their data is by relying on their community without any sort of trusted review process. This is cheap (almost free) but yields the kind of crappy results WoT has.

Combine these two and I can't imagine this is much of a company. It may have been at one point but if it was it was probably gutted long ago and is just lumbering along in zombie mode now.

I really believe this is a space that is ripe for someone to come along and do it right.

(Disclaimer: I have no idea what their current situation actually is, this is just my speculation from a cursory review of them a good 6-8 months ago.)

DuckDuckGo is sweet. Just yesterday I switched my default engine from Google to DDG. It's funny how bloated Google search has become.

just going to give my counterexample of still personally preferring google to ddg.

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