When you are on the Internet, you cannot really make a distinction between safe and unsafe websites right away. While you may get an indication by looking at the website’s address, title or description, it is usually not enough to distinguish between trustworthy and malicious or invasive sites.

That’s especially bad on search engines, when you do not even have the referring domain help you in the judgement. Once you are on the site, it may be to late. While you can check the site you are on for hints, it is a rather technical process. And even if you can, without proper protection it may already be too late as you may have already fallen pray to drive by downloads and other malicious attack forms that require no user interaction to be carried out.

Web of Trust is a browser extension for all popular web browsers that makes your web activities safer by displaying website ratings. It integrates nicely into popular search engines like Google, and social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. For each outgoing link displayed on these sites, you will see an icon that indicates whether the linked page is safe or not.

You can move the mouse cursor over the indicator to display a more detailed rating of the website’s trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety.

Web of Trust furthermore adds an icon to the browser toolbar which displays the overall rating of the page you are on right now. This helps if you visit pages manually or from sites where the trust rankings are not displayed

The icon indicates the rating, and you can click on it to see the detailed rating overview again.

Keep in mind that Web of Trust is a reporting tool, and not a tool that blocks your actions on the site. It is a handy extension that keeps you safer on the Internet. Interested users can download the extension for their browser at the official website.