Alternative search engine DuckDuckGo has announced a partnership with Web of Trust (WOT) to help improve the quality of its search results. DuckDuckGo already goes the extra mile to remove spam from search results, to crowd-source info, and to protect users’ privacy, and as founder Gabriel Weinberg notes in announcing the partnership, working with WOT “further extends all three of these focuses.”
Web of Trust (WOT) is a community-based safe surfing tool that uses a traffic-light rating system to help users stay safe as they search and shop online. The ratings are powered by a worldwide community of over 16 million users who, based on their experiences, rate the reputation of some 30 million websites in terms of trustworthiness, privacy, and vendor reliability.
With this partnership, DuckDuckGo has added a new setting option that allows you replace the favicons that appear next to site results with WOT’s traffic-light ratings. In other words, green is go; red, no go.
Earlier this week, we reported that Google had tweaked its search algorithm following a story in The New York Times about unscrupulous merchants gaming Google’s search rankings via negative merchant reviews.
The solution implemented by DuckDuckGo goes beyond just “algorithmic search” to generate results, something that works particularly well when you’re shopping or downloading.
