13 June 2019

Research pick: How trustworthy is that website? - "Trust evaluation of websites: a comprehensive study"

The internet is ubiquitous and for many people it is part of every aspect of their everyday lives from news and information to finding their way around a new city and from emailing close friends to finding a partner. But, how do we know which websites on the internet are trustworthy in so many different contexts?

Writing in the International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, Himani Bansal of the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India and Shruti Kohli of DWP Digital, in London, UK, suggest that a template is needed to assess the validity of information, this could be a matter of life or death with respect to medication information, they add.

The team has assimilated data from a range of websites that are classified by an external website as being “similar”. They have then aggregated all of the behaviour around those websites and analysed that data to see how the different sites are perceived by the users. They compared their scores for a website’s trustworthiness with assessments of the same websites made by others independently using different tools.

Trust is an essential factor in any relationship if it is to be a positive one and if it is to thrive. There is at the moment no common tool for assessing the trustworthiness of a website. The new approach taken in the present papers offers an alternative that may well allow us to validate websites objectively. Such a system might be interlaced with a search engine or be incorporated into a browser plugin or extension that would offer the user information about the trustworthiness of a site they intend to use.

Bansal, H. and Kohli, S. (2019) ‘Trust evaluation of websites: a comprehensive study‘, Int. J. Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, Vol. 13, Nos. 1/2, pp.101-112.

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