Since Web of Trust (WOT) lost the confidence of web users, Andy Shaw has been testing the alternatives
Webutation
www.webutation.net
Webutation is a website that lets you type in the address of a site you want to check the integrity of and see the results immediately (as long as it’s a website that’s been scanned previously). There’s also a browser add-on available for Chrome and Firefox (though there are reports of compatibility problems with recent versions of Mozilla’s browser) and a bookmarklet that works in any browser.
The combination of the website and the Chrome add-on is what we like most about the service. Neither is perfect, and the other award-winning services in this test do a better job individually as a website and an add-on, but they don’t offer the same combination of instant protection and research tools.
Webutation uses a selection of resources to build its opinion of a website, pairing information from Google’s Safe Browsing database (bit.ly/safe417) and an unbranded website-antivirus scanner. It also uses a ‘social reputation’ score, gathering information from Wikipedia, a parentalguidance rating, WOT and Webutation’s own users’ reviews. This is all put together to give each site a trust score out of 100.
The Chrome add-on only does one thing, which is to block your access to sites that fall below a certain level. For example, when we tried to visit a site that only had a Webutation score of 40 out of 100, the screen went black and a warning appeared. You can get around this warning but it provides a useful indication of whether a site is worth further investigation before you risk visiting it.
Other add-ons put ticks or green lights next to results in Google searches so you get an up-front, at-a-glance safety check, but Webutation offers no indication of whether a site is safe or not until you’ve clicked on it. Also, the link back to the website from the add-on is wrong, so you still need to research blocked sites manually.
When it comes to the crunch, none of the services we’ve reviewed here is perfect and there’s plenty of room for improvement. But Webutation’s combination of a block that stops you in your tracks, backed up by a database built on trusted services and real users’ experiences, is about as good as it gets.
URLVoid
www.urlvoid.com
URLVoid is a website that’s screaming out for someone to make a browser tool out of it. It’s similar in concept to Webutation’s online database of site information, but instead of using just a few trusted services, it follows the VirusTotal (www.virustotal.com) model and scrutinises every site it tests using a long list of external resources, including the ones associated with most of the other products we’ve reviewed here.
Unlike VirusTotal, where a problem flagged up by just one or two sites could be taken as a false positive, we would recommend that you take URLVoid’s individual recommendations of one or two warning flags more seriously, because none of the tools in this test is as comprehensive as we’d like, and URLVoid goes a long way to counter this with its breadth.
There’s no browser add-on to warn you of threats as you surf, which means you’re probably going to have to install one of the other services as well. You could use URLVoid in conjunction with Webutation: when the latter blocks a site, you could use URLVoid’s extended reputation database to look up information on it.
If URLVoid had a browser add-on, it would win our Gold Award in a flash. It looks and feels like the excellent VirusTotal and is a fantastic resource, but it would be a lot easier to use if it had a browser add-on.
Avast Online Security
bit.ly/avast417
Avast Online Security is a Chrome add-on that’s had almost as chequered a history as WOT, because some time ago it inserted adware that led shoppers toward particular sites. Thankfully, it’s since been cleaned up.
This was the only add-on we tested that flagged torrent sites as potentially suspicious in Google search results when we used the dubious search term ‘download rogue one free’. They were only greyed out as questionable, rather than marked as completely suspicious, but we felt this was a solid step in the right direction if you want your browser to protect you from potentially harmful sites.
The add-on also blocks advertising and social-media trackers, which you might find useful if you don’t already have another tool that does this.
The software successfully marks up Google searches, but it doesn’t flag advertising links. Also, it only works with Google and doesn’t examine links in DuckDuckGo or Bing searches. The additional tracking and blocking tools are useful, but a dedicated tool such as Ghostery (www.ghostery.com) will give you more control over what is blocked and what isn’t, which we find preferable to Avast’s blanket approach.
Avast Online Security does little more than just check your links as you browse, though it does this reasonably well and queried some sites that we had our doubts about, which the other services had let through without question.
Bitdefender Traffic Light
bit.ly/bdtl417
Bitdefender Traffic Light is an add-on for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, but we found that it wasn’t as strict as Avast. That said, it called out an innocuous site just for having Facebook links on it. You may or may not agree with Facebook tracking your location but it’s probably not something that would put most people off visiting a site.
Avira Browser Safety
bit.ly/avira417
Avira’s add-on, available for Chrome and Firefox, is a basic reporting tool that sits in the corner of your browser. We found its icon confusing, because it’s always red and when it encounters a page with trackers, a small green icon appears over the top, implying that the site is safe but that it’s blocking the trackers. We found this distracted us from the core ability we wanted, which was for the software to warn us of more serious dangers.
Norton Safe Search
safeweb.norton.com
Norton’s service lets you check the reputation of websites. However, its Safe Search add-on takes over Chrome’s search tool entirely, so when you type a search term into the address bar, it opens in Norton’s own search engine. This may provide a protected environment but we weren’t impressed by such heavy-handed tactics.