

DuckDuckGo/WOT search partnership - marilyn
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/12/duckduckgowot-search-partnership.html

======
i-like-water
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.

------
gscott
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.

------
smokinn
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.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
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.

~~~
MikeCapone
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..

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yeah, that is something I'm working on, but wanted to get this out in the mean
time.

------
captunderpants
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.

------
niels_olson
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?

~~~
smokinn
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.)

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

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

