Trust Necessitated through Metrics: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Websites

The issue of trust is of exhilarating concern in case of information disseminated through websites. Digitization technologies such as Internet has lowered the cost and increased the access to information of all kinds. This increased exposure to information from humongous number of websites poses a need for some mechanism or tool that can address this issue and provide rankings to the websites on basis of their credibility or the trust value they possess. Previous research has shown a lot of efforts in this area. Both exogenous and endogenous signals have been evaluated to derive the credibility of websites. Trust being more of a sociological virtue of psychometric nature; cannot be quantified easily. Aiming this fact we have tried to measure the trust by evaluating the actual behavioral metrics of the users (of the websites) which gets collected by analytical tools automatically with every hit on a website. This gives a pertinent and bias-free quantification of trust value of a website as tools collect the data being anonymous from the user. In this paper, we have introduced our novel web-based tool which estimates trust (of websites) imposed by web metrics collected through similarweb.com. The tool will re-rank the web-links (URLs) extracted from Google search engine for any keyword according to the trust maintained by the actual users of the websites. We will also evaluate the performance of our tool in terms of validated rankings and benchmarking it with other recently acceptable tools.