New SiteAdvisor is Top Notch!
This very interesting extension for Firefox (there’s an IE version too though) called SiteAdvisor. SiteAdvisor is designed to help keep you informed about the websites that you are visiting (or may visit). It works similarly to Google’s search engine, utilizing bots to scour the web and report back on the sites that they come across.
The sites get added to a master list which your local copy of SiteAdvisor can then access when you visit a site or perform a search to tell you if there’s anything you need to be concerned about from a particular website.
Another nice feature of the software is that it doesn’t just give you a vague impression of a site’s trustworthiness. It gives you the down-and-dirty details including whether they will try to bombard you with popups, install shady software on your computer, or spam your email address (should you give it out). If you’ve just performed a search, you can see a summary of the findings by moving your mouse over the icons next to the search results. Also, if you’ve already visited the site, you can click on the small SiteAdvisor button on the bottom-right corner of your screen and go to a page with an even more in-depth report of the website.
It even makes a chart of all the sites that the website in question links to and rates them (the quality of sites linked to also effects a page’s rating).
There were two things that did make me a little uneasy about the SiteAdvisor plugin at first. The first was that I was worried about what information it may collect about my browsing habits and the second was performance. Since the extension needs to contact its servers for every website you visit, this could conceivably slow down your browsing experience. Luckily, I noticed no slow-down on a high-speed internet connection. I also closely read the short EULA (short is good) and tried to find out what they did with my data, if anything at all. As it turns out, they do collect which websites you visit but they do not attach any personally identifiable information to the data.
They claim that the only reason they keep track of which websites are popular is to be able to make sure that popular websites get examined. This seems reasonable enough to me, and since they aren’t even attaching my IP address to this data, it seems fairly innocuous. It’s no more intrusive than the “PageRank” feature found in the Google Toolbar. In fact, SiteAdvisor seems to have beaten Microsoft to the punch in providing feedback on the quality of webpages (a feature planned for IE7). Good job! Alice Hill’s Real Tech News
