Pages with glyphs from the Unicode astral planes will no longer be ignored by the rating system. Until recently, few pages used those exotic characters. Now, at least one major content management system is using glyphs such as “globe” from the upper reaches of Unicode character space, so we now support them.
Support for single-word domains such as “amazon” has also been added, along with partial support for internationalized domain names.
Starting today, we give “Know who you’re dealing with” some teeth. With our Ad Limiter add-on installed, mouse over any rating icon. You’ll see a “dog tag”, like this:
SiteTruth "dog tag"
We tell you the name of the company behind the web site, its location, and its annual sales. Clicking on “SiteTruth profile” will bring up even more information about the company. Now you can easily decide if you want to deal with a strange company.
Companies that don’t clearly disclose their identity get a dog tag which is mostly blank. Do you want to deal with them?
The database of US businesses is currently being updated with 2012 data to improve the accuracy of results. Over the next few months, we will be adding additional business information and displaying it through our browser add-ons. When we say “know who you’re dealing with”, we mean it.
Update: The database update has been completed.
Update: April 26 – a major system update has been completed. Please let us know of any problems.
One ad per page. Better search results. Business address checking. Search with confidence.
Our latest add-on, Ad Limiter, blocks all but one ad per search result page. It rates search ads and search results. Then it picks the single best ad, keeps that one, and removes the others. (Yes, you can select how many ads to block.)
Ad Limiter does everything SearchRater does, too. New users should download Ad Limiter instead of SearchRater, while SearchRater will continue to work.
Our SearchRater add-on, which adds SiteTruth ratings to all search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Blekko, and DuckDuckGo, is now an approved Mozilla add-on. Download it from http://www.sitetruth.com.
The SiteTruth rating engine now recognizes Better Business Bureau seals and checks them against the BBB’s database. A valid BBB seal with a rating of B or better will give a site SiteTruth’s highest rating.
We are releasing an initial version of SearchRater, our plug-in for Firefox. This plug-in adds SiteTruth ratings to search results for Google, Bing, Yahoo, Blekko, and DuckDuckGo.
Click here to go to the installation page. After installing the plug-in, try searching for some heavily spammed terms, such as “New York locksmith” or “discount drugs”. We think you’ll like what you see.
(This is an experimental version of the plug-in. Please report any problems with comments here.)
Site ownership verified.Normal: 1055 9.3% Blocked: 16 0.1% Non Commercial: 242 2.1% TOTAL: 1313 11.6%
Site ownership identified but not verified.Normal: 2741 24.1% Blocked: 9 0.1% No Location: 506 4.5% Non Commercial: 229 2.0% TOTAL: 3485 30.7%
Not rated.No Website: 254 2.2% Non Commercial: 2194 19.3% TOTAL: 2448 21.6%
Site ownership unknown or questionable.Blocked: 67 0.6% Negative Info: 6 0.1% No Location: 4036 35.5% TOTAL: 4109 36.2%
Total advertised domains reported: 11355
We saw 11355 different domains promoted via AdSense ads. These are the domains linked to by the ads, not the domain on which the ad appeared.
12% of sites get our highest rating, down from 14% in 2008. 36% of the ads rate our “site unknown or questionable” rating. This percentage has held constant since we first did this analysis in 2008. 21% of sites are not rated. These are typically blogs, or sites where we don’t see commercial activity or ads. This is twice what we saw three years ago.
Entries marked “No Website” reflect domains that no longer have live web sites. There’s a considerable amount of churn in AdSense web sites. Less than a third of the web sites we’ve ever seen referenced in an AdSense ad are still live today.
“Blocked” sites are those with “robots.txt” files which forbid us from examining their contents. These are quite rare.
In summary, the nature of the Google AdSense customer base has not changed much in recent years.