It’s new! It’s improved! It’s, it’s, pretty much the same old TrustWatch.
Born Oct 30, 1999, trustwatch.com was first noticed by WaybackMachine in September 2004. Back then, it was a website verification service. You’d type in the website’s URL, and trustwatch would tell you if the site was on somebody’s list of paying customers had a valid third party digital certificate. If a site had no certificate, TrustWatch returned:
Not Verified. A Not Verified rating means that TrustWatch cannot determine that the site has been Verified by a Trusted Third Party. However, the site has not been listed on the TrustWatch ‘blacklists’ of disreputable sites. You should use caution before exchanging sensitive or confidential information with this site.
Of course, if a site owner felt compelled to avoid this nasty designation, certificates were readily available from well-heeled Verisign competitor GeoTrust… for a price. Apparently, that strategy didn’t capture enough imaginations.
So they hauled trustwatch.com back into the shop, bolted on Ask Jeeves (the search engine), and voila! The same pitch with a lackluster search component. So how have security-conscious web searchers responded to all the hoopla?
They haven’t. At this writing, Alexa ranks www.trustwatch.com as the 230,398th most popular site on the web. That puts it 230,395 spots behind Google, even 224,699 behind Gigablast. In fact, despite ubiquitous fawning by the likes of ZDNet, Time and InformationWeek, trustwatch.com, the site that wants to be your search security watchdog, finds itself sandwiched between Infosniff (183,525) and SureSeeker (251,917). As if that’s not bad enough, Whois Source reports that trustwatch.com’s popularity has actually plummeted in the last month.
OK. So folks don’t care much for TrustWatch. But is it any good? Depends on the meaning of good. In Trusted search software labels fraud site as ’safe’, The Register’s John Leydon writes the idea is laudable, “but the classification of a recently created phishing site as “verified as safe” raises serious doubts about the effectiveness of the [TrustWatch] technology. Such incorrect classifications create a false sense of security that can only play into the hands of would-be fraudsters.”
WaybackMachine apparently lost interest in November 2004. We lost interest when we tried it.
3 comments
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September 28th, 2005 at 3:41 pm
m$ftsux
Anyone smart enough to run a background check on questionable URLs probably doesn’t need a search engine like TrustWatch.
Anyone dumb enough to get caught by most phishing scams is probably too stupid to use a search engine like TrustWatch.
October 13th, 2005 at 2:55 pm
searcher
It seems to me that GeoTrust cannot replace Google over night. I doubt they have that expectation.I used it and seems it seems pretty good to me. I would check Alexa in a year and then do the comparision.
October 26th, 2005 at 8:20 am
Searcher
Looks like Alexa has them up to 111,100 - a jump of 150,000 in a week. I think the Alexa stuff you pointed out is a good way to track… according to it, they are moving up pretty fast. Again, I wonder if they will be in the top thousand sites in a year. At this pace I would say yes.