Webutation, Website Reputation Information

When you are on the Internet you face a dilemma. You do not know an awful lot about new sites that you visit. You do not know much about the company or people that operate a website for instance. That may not be a problem on sites that you just access for information, but what about shopping sites or sites where you enter personal information like your email address?

You’d probably want to know if you can trust a site with those information. Website reputation services in theory speed up the time it takes to come to a conclusion. Instead of having to search for information on search engines you could use their ratings to assess a website’s reputation more easily.

Experienced Internet users know that it is often not sufficient to use just one service for that. These services can be manipulated easily, for instance with fake user comments and ratings.

Webutation is a meta service that lists ratings from multiple services when user look up domain names on the website. The reputation service includes its own review service as well as the site’s Google Safebrowsing, Website Antivirus, Web of Trust and G-Rated / Child Safety rating. These ratings are then used to calculate the Webutation score.

You also see the site’s Google Pagerank and Alexa rank listed there. Some entries have an Info link next to them. If you hover your mouse cursor over them you will see additional information about the rating.

The only other option that you have is to switch from Rating to Twitter Buzz to see some of the recent Twitter messages that references the domain name.

I personally like Webutation as it combines the rating of multiple reputation and security services. It is still recommended to rely on other sources, e.g. a manual web search for issues related to the domain.