Google Policy Changes To Disallow Web Of Trust Ratings On Sponsored Links
Helsinki-based Web Of Trust noted on their blog yesterday that Google has changed its policy to disallow WOT and other website reputation services from showing reputations of the sponsored links shown before the search results. As lauded in this blogpost on the official Google blog, Google took down or disallowed 130 million malicious ads on their network in 2011 -- a 50% increase from the year before.
This is fantastic, but malicious ads do continue to slip through the cracks. In January of this year the BBC reported on Google profiting from ads sponsored by illegal Olympic ticket resellers, as well as illegal services such as fake ID cards, fake passports, and cannabis.
Something doesn't sit well with Google's policy change to control what external browser plugins can do with their search results. Google clearly decided that the marginal decrease in user safety was worth the money they could bring in from clicks to websites with a poor reputation on Web Of Trust and other website rating services. How does this fall in line with their "Don't be evil" mantra?
WOT Reaches Another Milestone: 30 Million Downloads
Community-powered safe surfing tool WOT reached another milestone this past Monday by passing 30 million downloads. The number of downloads has effectively doubled during the past 12 months and the latest figure checks off a great year for the Finnish company - a year that also included new partnerships with social media giant Facebook and Russian email provider Mail.ru.
WOT Partners With Kiosked For A Secure Online Shopping Experience
Security is a prerequisite in the real world and perhaps more so in the digital space. And with security online, comes WOT that has been ensuring a safe browsing experience for the millions of users online. WOT announced another major partnership earlier, this time with Kiosked.
Kiosked is an online service that transforms online content into a marketplace. The service provides consumers with access to more information as well as making both online and offline purchases easy. Kiosked was also one of the Arctic15 finalists this year.
Facebook Partners With WOT To Protect Its 700 Million Users
Facebook and Web of Trust (WOT) have today announced that they enter into partnership to protect Facebook's users with the WOT technology. WOT is a Finnish startup that has more than 20 million users globally and these users have rated more than 31 million websites. In essence, it's a crowdsourced way to rate malicious and threatening websites that aim to harm users. The WOT technology will be rolled out as a new feature in Facebook in the US today at 8pm EET and globally in about a week's time. This is a huge win for the Finnish company.
Interview With Vesa Perälä On Web Of Trust Lawsuit
We had reported about the lawsuit against Web of Trust (WOT) last week and had mentioned that we will be inquiring Vesa Perälä, CEO of WOT about the same. While talking about the lawsuit alone would have been a repetition, hence we thought of providing a well rounded information on WOT as well. I was quite impressed with its growth, its community is expected to grow to 50 million by the end of the current year.
Community Warnings Lend Web Of Trust A Lawsuit
It has barely been a couple of weeks when we last reported of WOT achieving a milestone with 2 million registered users and there is one more news already. The Web of Trust might have grabbed attention of all those users but it appears to be in hot waters right now.
WOT Achieves Another Milestone With 2 Millionth Registered Users
Web of Trust or WOT, the safe surfing software that protects surfers from malicious links, spyware and spam is growing bigger by the day. WOT achieved another milestone on 28th January, 2011 when it announced the registration of its 2 millionth users. Web of Trust had only recently released the WOT plugin for WordPress.
Web Of Trust Releases WOT Plugin For WordPress For Safer Blogging
We at Arctic Startup have talked about WOT or Web of Trust extensively and honestly love how it helps the online community. The safe surfing software keeps users protected from malicious links, spam, spyware, etc by warning them of such sites. The working is based around the idea of getting information from other trusted sources as well as from the online community.
WOT Adds Support For Color Vision Deficiency
This is cool in making the web more accessible to people around the world. While everyone's keeping a lot of noise about the fact that text should be readable and scalable larger if the viewer wishes to, not many people realise that about 8% of men and about 0,5% of all women suffer from color vision deficiency. WOT has added support for these people in their service.
Web of Trust is a service that can be used to find out the trustworhiness and safety of websites. It relies on peer ratings and comments to build up its database. The service itself has a destination site, but can be more commonly found as a browser plugin.
The Invisible Layer of Web Of Trust
I've been using Web of Trust's (WOT later) Firefox plugin for a while now and I have to say it has become extremely useful in my day-to-day usage. There are some interesting reasons behind it and I thought I should discuss this with our readers. WOT is a service we've blogged on ArcticStartup a few times and the previous mention was Monty's investment into the company.
I decided to take their Firefox plugin into use sometime back to see if it was any good. Today, it has become an inseparable part of my web surfing experience. I see a lot of potential in the company and the direction it is headed. Why is it so? Let me explain.
MySQL Founder Invests In WOT
Esa Suurio, one of the guys behind Web of Trust or WOT being developed by Against Intuition, tweeted about Michael "Monty" Widenius' investment into their company. Web of Trust produces a browser addon that keeps you acknowledged of unsafe websites, online scams, spyware, etc. The service works in a crowdsourced manner where by other web users rate websites and let other webusers know of unsafe web destinations. Esa Saario also told in his tweet that the addon has now been downloaded more than 3 million times.
Monty Widenius is one of the founders behind MySQL. He sold the company in January 2008 to SUN Microsystems for a billion dollars. It is one of the all time success stories of Nordic technology startups. Monty invested through his Open Ocean -venture company. The amount of the investment was not disclosed, but he will be taking a board of directors' seat with the investment. WOT does not disclose how the money will be spent.
WOT wants to make browsing safer
WOT, or Web of Trust, is a so called 'safe surfing' software that warns the users of ill websites, namely scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and unreliable shopping sites.
WOT wants to primarily see itself as a community website. The service gets it's information from other trusted sources that gather related data as well as from its user community. WOT software can be downloaded for Firefox (as I did) and for IE.
The company boast some impressive figures. According to WOT's CEO, Esa Suurio, it has 20 million rated website and broke 1 million user downloads during August 2008.
When asked about WOT's business model, Suurio says that they are still working on the best way to monetize the service, but that 20 million rated websites is clearly an asset, which the company is ready to lincense to third parties. Suurio adds that WOT can also act as a marketing platform. For this particular use new concepts that fit WOT's philophy and its community model are under way.
Before starting WOT Esa Suurio, a Finnish serial software entrepreneur, founded a local Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing house InfoManager and led the company for about ten years before a successful exit in August 2001 -just before the hardest downturn in the dot-com bubble years.
